SPLLOC: A new database for Spanish second language acquisition research

Abstract

The contribution of Spanish to the field of SLA continues to grow (Lafford & Salaberry 2003; Montrul 2004), and the need for good L2 Spanish datasets is becoming increasingly evident. In this paper we introduce a newly created database titled Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC), describing the rationale underlying the database design and methodology used for its construction. This project applying CHILDES tools to L2 Spanish follows successful creation of a collection of French L2 oral corpora (Rule et al. 2003), already available at www.flloc.soton.ac.uk. Creating a successful oral corpus is costly and available corpora are often built somewhat opportunistically from available material rather than designed in a balanced way to facilitate SLA research. The SPLLOC database has been designed to fill the existing gap in Spanish L2 resources and also to support a focused research agenda investigating learner development with respect to the verb phrase, clitic pronouns, and word order, from an interface perspective.

Gender agreement in interface contexts in the oral production of heritage speakers of Spanish in the Netherlands

“…First of all, it is possible that the latter two groups avoid the use of pronouns and prefer to express a full noun instead, a strategy that has been attested for L2 learners of Spanish (e.g. Mitchell et al 2008). The explanation may also lie in a transfer effect from Dutch, if pronominal reference turns out to be less frequent in Dutch than in Spanish.…”

The Comprehension of Tense–Aspect Morphology by Spanish Heritage Speakers in the United Kingdom

“…To answer these questions, a semantic interpretation task (adapted from the Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus (SPLLOC; splloc.soton.ac.uk); (Mitchell et al 2008;Domínguez et al 2013)) was administered using a web-based interface to seventeen Spanish-English bilingual children and their parents in the UK. In addition to the semantic interpretation task, the parents also completed a questionnaire (Bilingual Language Experience Calculator (BiLEC); e.g., Unsworth 2015) that allowed two measures of language exposure to be calculated for each child: relative exposure and cumulative exposure.…”

A ‘mixed methods’ approach for investigating aspect in a second language

“…The challenge for the field is to be able to establish appropriate protocols in the development and application of research designs which exploit the use of mixed research methods. This was the drive for the creation of the Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpora (a.k.a the 'SPLLOC' project) (see Mitchell et al, 2008) which was developed to implement a new methodological approach to the study of the emergence and development of aspect-related forms by English learners of Spanish. A variety of oral and comprehension tasks which included key discriminatory contexts were carefully developed to provide evidence to test some of the main predictions of leading hypothesis, the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis.…”

“…In particular, I discuss the explanatory limitations of studies which employ one single task, often an open-ended narrative to investigate the validity of Andersen's (1989Andersen's ( , 1991 Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH). Instead, I argue that studies which use a combination of oral production data and carefully-collected data through closed tasks and comprehension tests can provide better insights and more reliable evidence to investigate this hypothesis (Domínguez, Tracy-Ventura, Mitchell, Myles, & Arche, 2009;Domínguez et al, 2013;Mitchell et al, 2008;. The same rationale applies to investigating other hypotheses in our field.…”

“…I will show how some level of manipulation of so-called open-ended oral tasks can be useful to elicit target forms in key infrequent contexts. Furthermore, the combination of different task types can provide better insights than data elicited by one single task (Domínguez et al, 2009;Domínguez et al, 2013;Domínguez et al, 2017;Mitchell at al., 2008;.…”