engleski

Specialized corpora of spoken language: multiple gains on top of methodological challenges

Corpus-based research (language documentation and analysis of spoken and written language) is a common practice for studying language variations in the field of applied linguistics and linguistics in general (Svartvik, 1992). On top of its undeniable and growing importance in the area of linguistics, over the past few years it has become one of the most prominent method of assessment and therapy planning in speech-language pathology, as well (Ferguson et al., 2009). Although corpora are objective and comprehensive resource of language data collected in different modality (written vs spoken) and in various situations (formal vs informal), there is still a considerable lack of the ones that provide data about language of atypical population, such as speakers with language impairment. These corpora fall into the subcategory of specialized corpora which differ from the general or national corpora in many aspects, such as size, process of participant selection, methodology of data collection and transcription, process of annotation, grouping and analyses of production errors and many more. The aim of this presentation is to present some of the specialized corpora developed in the Laboratory for psycholinguistic research (Faculty of Education and Rehabilitation Sciences, University of Zagreb), with the special emphasis on methodological challenges in the process, since they consist of language samples of individuals without, but also with language impairment. Some of these corpora are: Croatian Adult Spoken Language Corpus (Kuvač Kraljević and Hržica, 2016), Croatian corpus of non- professional written language (Kuvač Kraljević and Hržica, in press), Croatian Discourse Corpus of Speakers with Aphasia (Kuvač Kraljević, Hržica and Lice, 2017) etc. On top of pure methodological issues related to their development, specialized corpora might serve as a source of many important data and consequently have immense practical implications. According to corpus-based data, linguists can i.e. plan dialectology studies, cross-linguistic studies and analyse phonological and morphological properties of a particular language, while speech and language pathologists can gain better insights into the underlying mechanisms of a certain condition, extract information regarding characteristics of production of specific population and plan their therapy sessions in order to make them more effective. In this presentation, both of these aspects (methodological challenges and practical implications) related to the development and analyses of specialized corpora, will be discussed.

Specialized corpora ; Methodological challenges ; Practical implications

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