In recent years, a range of theoretical perspectives and research methodologies in sociolinguistics has been applied to the analysis of the spoken and written discourse of children with specific language impairment and adults with acquired language impairment (aphasia) associated with brain damage. However, while linguistic sampling and analytic methods have been used, typically these methods have been integrated within experimental research designs, informed by the field of psychology. This approach has meant that the generalisability of findings from research in the field of communication disorders is often hampered by small numbers of participants and samples, as each individual research study faces the difficulties of participant recruitment associated with relatively rare disabilities and the need to ensure that potential research participants are not overburdened by research demands. Additionally, studies of pathological discourse face important questions in relation to establishing the range of typical variation in language use in the general community, and such questions necessarily require larger sampling than is possible in the context of most research studies.
To-date, the largest initiative to address these problems has been led by Professor Brian MacWhinney, though the development of the CHILDES database. This important work has recently been extended through his team’s development of the TalkBank web-site, which in 2007 commenced the development of ‘AphasiaBank’. This paper will review the past and potential future uses of corpus-based research in the field of speech-language pathology, in order to identify the types of research directions that could be explored through corpus-based methodology.
Authors: Alison Ferguson
Event: SF08: Designing the Australian National Corpus Workshop