THE WORKSHOP

On 15-16th June 2023, the research team of the ANACOREX research project and members of BilinguaLab are organising its second workshop on Anaphora Resolution in Second Language Acquisition II (ARISLA II) at the Universidad de Granada. We will bring together different methodological and theoretical approaches to anaphora resolution in bilingualism and second language acquisition (SLA), such as corpus and (psycho)linguistic approaches.

The aim of the workshop is (i) to present the latest research conducted within the ANACOREX project regarding anaphora resolution; (ii) to create synergies between the ANACOREX national and international team members as well as well-known (inter)national researchers working on anaphora resolution; (iii) to deepen our understanding of the multiple factors that constrain anaphora resolution in SLA.

You are more than welcome to attend our workshop!

THE RESEARCH PROJECT

The overarching goal of the ANACOREX research project is to understand how late bilinguals (=learners of a second language, L2) use anaphoric forms to refer to their antecedents in previous discourse. We use large corpus data, as well as experimental data, to investigate this in several language combinations.

A key question in bilingualism is how the two languages are acquired and processed in bilinguals, as well as the way they interact in their minds.  We investigate this by focusing on anaphora resolution (AR). In AR, anaphoric referring expressions (REs) relate to their antecedents in prior discourse. We seek to understand the multiple (psycho)linguistic, cognitive and cross-linguistic factors that constrain the choice of these REs in bilinguals. We do so by triangulating: 

• • different research methods: corpus and experiments (self-paced reading tasks, eye tracking);

  • different data from the same bilinguals (spoken vs. written);

  • different language backgrounds of the bilinguals (L1 Spanish-L2 English, L1 English-L2 Spanish, L1 Spanish-L2 Japanese, as well other learners of L2 English and L2 Spanish with different L1 backgrounds).

  • different bilinguals, mostly adult L2 learners, but also L1 attriters of Spanish (i.e., those whose L1 Spanish is eroded due to a high exposure to L2 English) in a naturalistic setting and also in a university setting, as well a bilingual children.

Our corpora are being collected online via the web portal LEARNERCORPORA.COM: 

• • CEDEL2 corpus (Corpus Escrito del Español como L2), which contains data from L2 Spanish learners from different L1s (English, German, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Portuguese, Estonian, Italian, Vietnamese, French, Chinese, Greek, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Swedish), as well as comparable subcorpora of native Spanish, Arabic, Greek, Japanese and Portuguese. CEDEL2 (version 2) is already available online at cedel2.learnercorpora.com.

  • COREFL (Corpus of English as a Foreign Language), which contains data from L1 Spanish/German learners of L2 English, as well as a comparable native English subcorpus. COREFL is available at http://corefl.learnercorpora.com/. 

  • JFLCorp (Japanese as a Foreign Language Corpus), which contains data from L1 Spanish learners of L2 Japanese. It is still under development.

Specifically, the two major project goals are (i) to better understand the mechanisms underlying the language of adult bilingual learners of a second language in relation to AR by using corpus and experimental approaches, as well as their triangulation; (i) to create new electronic resources (corpora) like JFLCorp and enlarge existing corpora like CEDEL2  and COREFL to investigate anaphora resolution in SLA.