The Structure of Learner Varieties

Project

This is the website of the European research network "The structure of learner varieties". This project involves about 40 researchers from different European countries and is co-ordinated at the Max-Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. The project co-ordinator is Christine Dimroth.

In this project, the process of second language acquisition is not characterized in terms of errors and deviations, but in terms of the two-fold systematicity which it exhibits: the inherent systematicity of a learner variety at a given time, and the way in which such a learner variety evolves into another one. New types of naturalistic and experimental data collections are constantly added to the joint L2-corpus that is hosted at the MPI archive and also includes the ESF data.

The project is concerned with the study of untutored second language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and longitudinal perspective. Structure and development of learner varieties are investigated in the project's six research areas that are dealing with the following topics:

Research Area	Responsible
Acquisition of aspect & temporal structure	Monique Lambert (U. Paris 8)
Acquisition of finiteness	Christine Dimroth (MPI, Nijmegen)
Lexical development	Giuliano Bernini (U. Bergamo)
Scope particles and Information Structure	Sandra Benazzo (U. Lille 3)
Development of the topic component	Marina Chini (U. Pavia)
Phonetics and phonology of learner intonation	Aoju Chen (MPI, Nijmegen)