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Article published In: ITL - International Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 79/80 (1988) ► pp.77–112

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Morpheme Data Analysis in Second Language Acquisition Research

Renewing an Old Debate and Raising New Issues

 | University of Pennsylvania
Published online: 1 January 1988
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https://doi.org/10.1075/itl.79-80.04pic
Abstract
This article will review options which confront second language acquisition researchers in their analysis of a learner’s morpheme production. It will first critically examine several different procedures which can be used to compute production accuracy, particularly when assigning values to morpheme oversuppliance, substitution, and regularization, and then review various ways in which morpheme suppliance scores can be computed within individual linguistic contexts or on overall basis, across a speaker’s corpus.
Conversations with 18 native Spanish speaking adult acquirers of English L2 will be used to highlight the often contradictory results obtained when one procedure is chosen over another to quantify the same corpus of morphemes, and to set forth problems which arise when comparisons are made of learners whose morpheme production accuracy has not been computed under the same procedures. Finally, the argument will be made that issues arising from procedural choices in morpheme data analysis are also relevant to research on other dimensions of second language acquisition.
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