This study evaluated second language (L2) phraseological development using a directional association measure (delta P) that assesses the directional formulaicity of recurrent multiword combinations. The study examined (a) whether learners develop their sensitivity to the distributional properties of recurrent multiword combinations as their…

The current study responds to the call for increased dialogue among different areas of additional language research. Specifically, we bring together learner corpus research and variationist approaches to second language acquisition to advance learner corpus research in two ways: (a) by modeling interlanguage development and variability and (b) by…

Historically, first language acquisition research was a painstaking process of observation, requiring the laborious hand coding of children's linguistic productions, followed by the generation of abstract theoretical proposals for how the developmental process unfolds. Recently, the ability to collect large-scale corpora of children's language…

This article contributes to the debate about the appropriate use of corpus data in language learning research. It focuses on frequencies of linguistic features in language use and their comparison across corpora. The majority of corpus-based second language acquisition studies employ a comparative design in which either one or more second language…

Usage-based approaches explore how we learn language from our experience of language. Related research thus involves the analysis of the usage from which learners learn and of learner usage as it develops. This program involves considerable data recording, transcription, and analysis, using a variety of corpus and computational techniques, many of…

The "Common European Framework of Reference" (CEFR) is the most widespread reference tool for linking language tests, curricula, and national educational standards to levels of foreign language proficiency in Europe. In spite of this, little is known about how the CEFR levels (A1-C2) relate to empirical learner language(s). This article…

This article focuses on the use of collocations in language learning research (LLR). Collocations, as units of formulaic language, are becoming prominent in our understanding of language learning and use; however, while the number of corpus-based LLR studies of collocations is growing, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of factors…

The advent of usage-/exemplar-based approaches has resulted in a major change in the theoretical landscape of linguistics, but also in the range of methodologies that are brought to bear on the study of language acquisition/learning, structure, and use. In particular, methods from corpus linguistics are now frequently used to study distributional…

The present study analyzes morphological productivity for complex verbs in second language acquisition by analyzing a corpus of German as a Foreign Language (GFL). It shows that advanced learners of GFL use prefix and particle verbs relatively frequently and productively but less so than native speakers do and discusses these findings in the light…

Models of language acquisition are constrained by the information that learners can extract from their input. Experiment 1 investigated whether 3-month-old infants are able to encode a repeated, unsegmented sequence of five syllables. Event-related-potentials showed that infants reacted to a change of the initial or the final syllable, but not to…

This study applied systematic meta-analytic procedures to summarize findings from experimental and quasi-experimental investigations into the effectiveness of using the tools and techniques of corpus linguistics for second language learning or use, here referred to as data-driven learning (DDL). Analysis of 64 separate studies representing 88…

Research into frequency intuition has focused primarily on native (L1) and, to a lesser degree, nonnative (L2) speaker intuitions about single word frequency. What remains a largely unexplored area is L1 and L2 intuitions about collocation (i.e., phrasal) frequency. To bridge this gap, the present study aimed to answer the following question: How…

In the past 15 years, a substantial body of evidence has confirmed that a powerful distributional learning mechanism is present in infants, children, adults and (at least to some degree) in nonhuman animals as well. The present article briefly reviews this literature and then examines some of the fundamental questions that must be addressed for…

Taking a dynamic usage-based perspective, this longitudinal case study compares the development of sentence complexity in speaking versus writing in two beginner Taiwanese learners of English (identical twins) in an extensive corpus consisting of 100 oral and 100 written texts of approximately 200 words produced by each twin over 8 months. Three…

Each of us as language learners had different language experiences, yet somehow we have converged upon broadly the same language system. From diverse, often noisy samples, we have attained similar linguistic competence. How so? What mechanisms channel language acquisition? Could our linguistic commonalities possibly have converged from our shared…