Event Details

This event is co-organised by the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group, the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), and UiT’s C/LaBL Brain Domain. We are delighted to welcome Prof. Stefanie Wulff (University of Florida) as our invited speaker in our joint seminar series.

Title: Advocating for a multi-method approach to capturing language experience

Abstract

While the notion of “usage”, or language experience, is traditionally associated with usage-based approaches to language acquisition, there is growing recognition across theoretical frameworks that language experience plays an important role in better understanding language development. Specifically, there is growing awareness that language experience is a multi-faceted construct that impacts different language learners in different ways. In this talk, I advocate for an inter-disciplinary, multi-method approach that seeks to expand how we define and measure usage. I first outline the historical roots of “usage” in cognitive-functional linguistics before turning to a brief description of more recent work that suggests a place for usage across theoretical perspectives. I then discuss three examples of how usage can be defined and measured regarding different linguistic structures, different time frames, and different language learners using correspondingly varied methods: (i) a study that combined production solicitation with experimental techniques to examine Japanese heritage speakers returning to Japan after an extended stay in Great Britain, and tracked their use of referential pronouns in Japanese and English over a course of five years (Kubota et al., 2025); (ii) a corpus-based study that revisited the dative alternation in child first language acquisition, making suggestions for how to expand available data from a hand-annotated sample of 10,709 attestations to a much larger sample of 36,509 hits annotated by a BERT language model (Liu et al., 2024); and (iii) an ongoing study that looks to expand the notion of usage itself by exploring the extent to which compositional and structural features of speakers’ personal social networks impact the development of their language production skills, assessed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (Rossi et al., in progress). I close with suggestions of how anyone working on usage can expand their research conceptually and methodologically beyond what these three examples imply.

References

Kubota, M., Chondrogianni, V., Kurokawa, S., Wulff, S., and Rothman, J. 2025. Changes in referential production among Japanese-English bilingual returnee children: a five-year longitudinal study. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. Published online first: 1-12. doi:10.1017/S1366728925000173

Liu, Z., Yang, H., Cruz, J., & Wulff, S. 2024. Modeling the dative alternation in early child language. Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 7.1:338–342.

Rossi, E., Liu, Z., McCarty, C., Pascual Y Cabo, D., & Wulff, S. in progress. Measuring the dynamic impact of personal social network structure on language learning.

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