READ ME File For 'Datasets used to conduct the research of the doctoral thesis entitled "The effects of WMC on L2 oral fluency and acceptability of object resumptive pronouns among adult learners'

Dataset DOI: 10.5258/SOTON/D1533

ReadMe Author: Deida Perea Irigoyen, University of Southampton ORCID ID: 0000-0003-0424-7521

This dataset supports the thesis entitled:Exploring the Effects of Working Memory Capacity on Second Language Oral Fluency and the Acceptability of Object Resumptive Pronouns on Adult Learners 
AWARDED BY: University of Southampton
DATE OF AWARD: 2020

DESCRIPTION OF THE DATA
Ethical Approval: ERGO Approval Number 23509
In order to guarantee that the participant's data was protected, the identity of the participants remained anonymous by using only their nicknames, storing the responses and their participation in a private laptop secured with a password to which only the researcher had access, and not sharing the participant's personal data and information with anyone that was not involved in the investigation. 
The thesis research involved 2 studies that were aimed to answer the following questions:
Study 1: Does working memory capacity (WMC) have an effect on the L2 oral fluency of late L2 learners (L2Aers)?
Study 2: Does WMC have an effect on the acceptability of object resumptive (R) pronouns among L2Aers?
In order to answer these questions the following tasks were created:
A Reading Span Task (RST) and Listening Span Task (LST) to measure WMC.
For Study 1: a Speech Generation Task (SGT) to extract temporal measures of L2 oral fluency.
For Study 2: a Grammaticality Judgment Task (GJT) to measure the acceptability of R pronouns.
The research involved 3 groups of participants:
A group of intermediate L2Aers
A group of advanced L2Aers
A group of native speakers of English
Therefore, the data here included is comprised and was used in the following manner:
- The results of the RST and LST are available in an Excel database, and are organized by group of participants; these data were used for both study 1 and study 1.
- The results of the calculation of temporal measures of oral fluency are available in an Excel database and organized by group of participants. These measures were used for study 1.
- To extract the measures of oral fluency, the responses from the SGT were recorded and analyzed using PRAAT. The recorded responses are available in audio format and last approximately 30 seconds each. The audios are organized in folders; a folder has been created by group of participants. These audios were used to extract temporal measures of oral fluency for study 1.The audios here included are the recorded responses of the participants to the Speech Generation Task (SGT). 
- The rates of acceptability for R pronouns (and for the other sentence conditions) are available in the Excel data based here included. The databases are organized by language of the GJT and sentence condition; an individual Excel database was created per group of participants. These databases were used for Study 1.
- The rates of acceptability were collected using a GJT in English and Spanish. The links to the online forms that were used to apply these GJTs are available in this dataset as well. 
- A pilot to test the acceptability of the grammatical conditions included in the GJT was conducted. The links to the online forms of the GJTs in English and Spanish are included, as well as the Excel databases in which the responses of the pilot GJTs are included. An Excel database was created for the responses of the pilot GJT in English, and one for the GJT in Spanish (the pilot GJTs were applied to native speakers of English and native speakers of Spanish). 

This dataset contains:
Audios
Links to online forms
Excel databases 

Date of data collection: 10 October 2016 to 18 December 2016



Licence:
CC BY


Date that the file was created: September, 2020