The following text presents part of a trans-lingual research project which aims at the comparison of the acquisition of French and Polish as second languages. The empirical research presented below attempts to answer questions about the extent of language categorisation (semantic/syntactic structures), characteristics of the mother tongue, and influences of the representation of the objective world in the moment when an adult who is learning a (typologically different) foreign language starts to use it in actual communication.
This paper focuses on the acquisition of the second language (L2) and the development of syntactic competence in communication. The topic is discusses in relation to syntactic structure of narratives produced by Polish learners of French L2. The author observes in detail how language learners build simple and complex sentences (coordinating/subordinating conjunctions, complex/simple sentences ratio, para- and hypotactic sentence structures) at the three different moment of SLA: 6th, 12th and 35th month of their classroom learning/teaching (developmental and comparative approach).
The Childes Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), composed of Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) and Computerized Language Analysis (CLAN), offers the possibility of transcription, grammatical coding and analysis of transcripts of language data, which can be used in psycholinguistics research. The CHILDES system enables us to code language data and provides easy and fast access to automatically-generated sets, such as, for example, statistical information concerning the frequency of words, the contexts in which they appear, syntactic properties, combination of keywords as well as type/token ratio. The paper briefly presents the CHILDES, with a particular emphasis on those of its functions which can be employed in research on language acquisition.
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