An interesting article in the New York Times today about research done at MIT by Dr. Portland and colleagues. Essentially, by using mobile devices dicourse data is collected over a period of weeks or months to identify, conversational, especially prosodic, characteristics. He calls this type of data gathering ‘reality mining – using data mining algorithms to parse the real life, analog world of social interactions’.
I am wondering if this could be used with L2 speakers,either for modelling purposes, or for research, to record L2 speakers’ development. Fascinating – you can read more here.