Every Verb in Its Right Place? A Roadmap for Operationalizing Developmental Stages in the Acquisition of L2 German

Josef Ruppenhofer, Matthias Schwendemann, Annette Portmann, Katrin Wisniewski, Torsten Zesch


Abstract
Developmental stages are a linguistic concept claiming that language learning, despite its large inter-individual variance, generally progresses in an ordered, step-like manner. At the core of research has been the acquisition of verb placement by learners, as conceptualized within Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1989). The computational implementation of a system detecting developmental stages is a prerequisite for an automated analysis of L2 language development. However, such an implementation faces two main challenges. The first is the lack of a fully fleshed out, coherent linguistic specification of the stages. The second concerns the translation of the linguistic specification into computational procedures that can extract clauses from learner-produced text and assign them to a developmental stage based on verb placement. Our contribution provides the necessary linguistic specification of the stages as well as detaiiled discussion and recommendations regarding computational implementation.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.589
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
6655–6670
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.589
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Josef Ruppenhofer, Matthias Schwendemann, Annette Portmann, Katrin Wisniewski, and Torsten Zesch. 2024. Every Verb in Its Right Place? A Roadmap for Operationalizing Developmental Stages in the Acquisition of L2 German. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 6655–6670, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Every Verb in Its Right Place? A Roadmap for Operationalizing Developmental Stages in the Acquisition of L2 German (Ruppenhofer et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.589.pdf