From Psycholinguistic Modelling of Interlanguage in Second Language Acquisition to a Computational Model

From Psycholinguistic Modelling of Interlanguage in Second Language Acquisition to a Computational Model Montse Maritxalar Arantza Diaz de Ilarraza Maite Oronoz Dept. of Computer Dept. of Computer Dept. of Computer Languages and Systems. Languages and Systems. Languages and Systems. Univ. of the Basque Country Univ. of the Basque Country Univ. of the Basque Country 649 postakutxa 20080 649 postakutxa 20080 649 postakutxa 20080 Donostia. Spain Donostia. Spain Donostia. Spain j ipmaanm~si, ehu. es j ipdisaa@si, ehu. es j iboranm©si, ehu. es Abstract The present article demostrates the im- plementation of a psycholinguistic model of second language learners' interlanguage in an Intelligent Computer Assisted Lan- guage Learning (ICALL) system for study- ing second language acquisition. We have focused our work on the common interlan- guage structures of students at the same language level. The Interlanguage Level Model (ILM) is made up of these struc- tures. In this paper we explain the conceptual model of ILMs, we present the experimen- tal method followed for collecting written materiM, we describe the output of the modelling tool, and finally some conclu- sions and future work are outlined. 1 Introduction The main goal of this article is to show the imple- mentation of a psycholinguistic model of second lan- guage learners' interlanguage in an Intelligent Com- puter Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) sys- tem for studying second language acquisition. The ICALL system, and the computational model for representing interlanguage, have been designed after previous work on psycholinguistics, artificial intelli- gence, and computational linguistics. This article will be focused on the computational model of inter- language. Description of the ICALL system can be found in (Maritxalar et al., 1994). The concepts transitional dialects (Corder, 1971) and approximate systems (Nemser, 1971) are pre- cursors to interlanguage (Selinker, 1972) (Selinker, 1992). Their aim was to define communicative and grammatical competence in second languages. All of them have these common features: a) a student's discourse is independent from the native lan- guage (L1) and the target language (L2) and it is the product of a structured linguistic sys- tem; b) the linguistic system is variable during the learning process and it is very similar in students of the same language level, with the exception of some differences, results of a person's learning expe- rience. In our case, the above mentioned character- istics are the basis for modelling the interlanguage. For example, as the linguistic system is very simi- lar in students of the same level, we can infer that we will have an interlanguage model for each level. Therefore, in our ICALL system we find a mod- ule where the different Interlanguage Level Models (ILMs) of each language level are represented. Rep- resentation of the ILMs will be presented in this ar- ticle. Our work is based on corpus analysis. At this moment we have focused on the implementation of the morphological and morphosyntactic competence at word level. Work at word level is important in our case because Basque is an agglutinative lan- guage with rich morphosyntactic information within words. …

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