@inproceedings{banawan-etal-2026-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Writing Development as Coordinated Change Across Linguistic and Semantic Dimensions",
    author = "Banawan, Michelle  and
      Potter, Andrew  and
      Arner, Tracy  and
      McNamara, Danielle S",
    editor = "Ma, Martin Ziqiao  and
      Liu, Emmy  and
      Liu, Jing  and
      Chang, Tyler A.  and
      Fourtassi, Abdellah  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Hahn, Michael  and
      Sun, Weiwei  and
      Shi, Freda",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Computational Developmental Linguistics ({CDL})",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Grand Hyatt Manchester San Diego, 1 Market Pl, San Diego, CA 92101",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.cdl-1.14/",
    pages = "83--91",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-428-6",
    abstract = "Writing development is often assessed through aggregate improvements in surface-level features, yet less attention has been given to how multiple linguistic dimensions evolve jointly over time. We model writing development as a multidimensional system shaped by stable individual variation and instructional progression across staged assignments, using interpretable linguistic features from the Writing Analytics Toolkit (WAT) and transformer-based sentence embeddings.Variance partitioning reveals substantial between-student stability alongside stage-dependent change. Mixed-effects models identify non-uniform developmental trajectories: academic focus, information density, and conventional language increase, whereas development of ideas and lexical variety decline, indicating tradeoffs across competing dimensions. Cross-lagged analyses further show dynamic dependencies between dimensions, suggesting coordinated change rather than independent progression.Embedding-based analyses capture stage-dependent shifts in semantic representation, with larger changes in earlier stages and increasing stability over time. Although assignment structure contributes to observed variation, stable individual differences and cross-stage dependencies indicate underlying developmental processes that generalize across tasks.Together, these findings characterize writing development as structured change in a multidimensional representational system, highlighting the need for computational models that capture stable variation, non-monotonic trajectories, and interactions among linguistic components."
}