Transforming the Primary Research Process through a Virtual Linguistic Lab for the Study of Language Acquisition and Use: Challenges and Accomplishments

Volume 3, Issue 1 (June 2012), pp. 34–46

Download PDF

@article{jocse-3-1-5,
  author={Maria Blume and Barbara Lust},
  title={Transforming the Primary Research Process through a Virtual Linguistic Lab for the Study of Language Acquisition and Use: Challenges and Accomplishments},
  journal={The Journal of Computational Science Education},
  year=2012,
  month=jun,
  volume=3,
  issue=1,
  pages={34--46},
  doi={https://doi.org/10.22369/issn.2153-4136/3/1/5}
}

This project involves both the development of a community of scholars committed to cross-institution, interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic collaboration (a Virtual Center for Language Acquisition, VCLA) and the creation of a web-based infrastructure through which a new generation of scholars can learn concepts and technologies empowered through this CI environment. These technologies, constituting a Virtual Linguistic Lab (VLL), provide the student with the structure for data creation, data management and data analysis as well as the tools for collaborative data sharing. This infrastructure, informed and executed through computational science, involves the coherent integration of an open web-based gateway (The VCLA website), linked to a specialized web-based VLL portal which includes not only real world examples and visualizations of data creation and analyses, but several cybertools by which these data can be managed and analyzed. This infrastructure subserves both the beginning student and the researcher pursuing calibrated methods and structured data sharing for collaborative purposes. Students continually engage in the development of the cybertools involved and in the scientific method involved in primary research. In this paper we summarize our objectives, the challenges we face and the solutions we have developed to these challenges. At this point, the project is just completing an implementation stage and is being readied to move to a diffusion stage.