ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of what corpus software can reveal about language development. The chapter starts with a brief discussion of the theoretical conceptualisation of first and second language development and then offers a summary of the various types of metrics that have been proposed for gauging language development in first and second language research. A detailed discussion of the different ways in which corpus resources, tools and methodologies can be used to find out about first and second language development follows. The chapter concludes by outlining a number of future developments that would benefit corpus-based language development research.
