Construction Coordination in First and Second Language Acquisition

Repetition of linguistic forms is a pervasive coordination mechanism in interactive language use. In this paper, we investigate patterns of cross-participant repetition in dialogues where participants have different levels of linguistic ability. Achieving a better understanding of these patterns can not only shed light on how humans coordinate in conversation, but may also contribute to developing more natural and effective dialogue agents in education contexts related to language learning. Our approach is novel in several respects: We focus on multi-word constructions at the lexical and morphosyntactic level, consider both first and second acquisition dialogue, and contrast these setups with adult native conversation. The results of our study show that language acquisition scenarios are characterised by richer inventories of shared constructions but lower usage rates than fluent adult dialogues, and that shared construction use evolves as the linguistic ability of the learners increases, arguably leading to a process of routinisation.