Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpus splloc
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Researchers using this database are asked to acknowledge the SPLLOC projects (http://www.splloc.soton.ac.uk) in any publication arising from their work. They are also asked to acknowledge the CHILDES project as outlined at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu.

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The overall goal of the Spanish Learner Language Oral Corpora (SPLLOC) programme is to promote research on the acquisition of Spanish as L2, by:

Research such as this enables us to better understand the processes involved in learning a second language in a classroom setting, and thus supports curriculum design for L2 education, as well as exploring fundamental theoretical questions in second language acquisition.

So far, the programme consists of two research projects, SPLLOC 1 (April 2006-March 2008) and SPLLOC 2 (August 2008-January 2010). In both projects, data has been collected from classroom learners of Spanish (with English as their first language), from beginners to advanced level, using specially designed elicitation tasks. For comparison purposes, native speakers were also recorded undertaking the same tasks. The resulting database of L2 Spanish contains digital soundfiles of learner speech, in varying genres, accompanied by transcripts in CHILDES format.

The material collected through SPLLOC 1 includes learner narratives, interviews and picture description tasks. This material is now freely available for use among the Spanish second language acquisition research community, through this website.

The substantive research programme of SPLLOC 1 is investigating the acquisition of central morphosyntactic properties of Spanish, such as word order and clitic pronouns, providing a description and analysis of developmental sequences of L2 Spanish from an interface perspective. Phenomena such as lexical diversity and the role of rote-learned formulas in instructed L2 Spanish are also being studied.

Fieldwork for SPLLOC 2 is currently in progress. The substantive research programme of SPLLOC 2 concerns the development of tense and aspect in L2 Spanish, and new elicitation tasks have been designed to elicit especially rich data in this area.

The SPLLOC projects adhere generally to the researcher and user ground rules which have been developed by the CHILDES project at Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Our data is also available to the SLA community via Talkbank.

These projects are funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (RES-000-23-1609 and RES-062-23-1075).

A flyer is available about the SPLLOC projects.

ESRC Economic and Social Research Council University of Southampton Newcastle University University of York