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Examining individual variation in learner production data: A few programmatic pointers for corpus-based analyses using the example of adverbial clause ordering

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 December 2020

Stefan Th. Gries Open the ORCID record for Stefan Th. Gries [Opens in a new window]  and
Stefanie Wulff
Stefan Th. Gries*
Affiliation:
UC Santa Barbara/JLU Giessen
Stefanie Wulff
Affiliation:
University of Florida/UiT The Arctic University of Norway
*
*Corresponding author. Stefan Thomas Gries, Department of Linguistics, 3506 South Hall, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA93106-3100. E-mail: stgries@linguistics.ucsb.edu
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Abstract

This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

Keywords

Chinese learnersEnglish adverbial clausesGerman learnerslearner corporaregression modeling
Type
Original Article
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 42 , Special Issue 2: Special Issue: Individual Differences in Bilingualism , March 2021 , pp. 279 - 299
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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