Extended Reality Language Research: Data Sources, Taxonomy and the Documentation of Embodied Corpora

Abstract

This article introduces extended reality linguistics, an emerging interdisciplinary field that explores the use of extended reality technologies in the scientific study of language. It delves into a variety of data sources for language study accessible through extended reality and showcases the advancements in data collection, visualization and analysis that this technology and its unique properties offer linguistic researchers. A comprehensive taxonomy of extended reality data is also presented, along with a survey of its applications in recent linguistic studies, offering further insights into the potential implications for future work. The article culminates in a pilot report on CEERR, an ongoing extended reality corpus linguistic project. This report highlights the innovative concepts of virtual linguistic fieldwork, communicative event reconstruction and embodied linguistic corpora. The CEERR pilot corpus demonstrates the powerful potential of extended reality for language documentation, prompting consideration of new grounds that traverse previous boundaries of language research data.