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

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.