CHILDES Irish Gaeltacht Corpus


Thea Cameron-Faulkner
School of Psychological Sciences
The University of Manchester

website

Tina Hickey
Linguistics
University College Dublin

website

Paul Fletcher
Department of Speech and Hearing
University College Cork, Ireland

website

Participants: 1
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: Ireland
Media type: audio access blocked by IRB
DOI: doi:10.21415/T5202F

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In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by the above reference.

Project Description

The Gaeltacht Corpus consists of data of one native Irish-speaking family from the west coast of Ireland. The target child (Eoin) was being raised as a first language speaker of Irish. At the time of the study, Eoin was the younger of two children and aged 1;5 at the onset of recording. Eoin's mother was a native speaker of Irish and his father had native-like proficiency. Irish was the language of the home and consequently Eoin's first language. The members of his extended family living in the neighborhood were also native speakers of Irish. The project followed Eoin over the period of one year and aimed to collect one hour of recording every week.

Data collection and transcription

The mother was equipped with a DV-recorder incorporating a wide-angled lens and asked to conduct one hour of recording per week. The hour of recording could consist of one session or multiple sessions dependent on the situation (i.e. time limitations, the activity, or mood of the child). This approach to data collection was adopted in order to elicit the most representative and natural sample of interaction as opposed to set hour-long sessions in the presence of a research assistant. The speech of Eoin and his mother was coded for pragmatic function using the Inventory of Communicative Acts-Abridged (INCA-A) (Ninio et al. 1994).

Acknowledgement

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the family of the project for their time and patience. Also our thanks go to a team of dedicated transcribers; Catherine Muldoon, Caitriona Ryan, Louise Keegan, Emma Gleason, Sláine Cahillane, Diarmuid O Gruagáin, Diarmuid Clifford, Maire Treasa Ni Cheallaigh, Darina Ní Shíthigh, and Ciara O’Toole.

The collection and transcription of the corpus was funded by ESRC grant number RES 000-22-1125.