CHILDES Mandarin Tong Corpus

Xiangjun Deng Bilingualism and Language Disorders Laboratory Chinese University of Hong Kong dengxj98@gmail.com

Virginia Yip Dept. of Modern Languages & Intercultural Studies Chinese University of Hong Kong vyip@humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk

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Citation information

Deng, X. & Yip, V. (2018). A multimedia corpus of child Mandarin: The Tong corpus. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 46 (1): 69-92.

Deng, X. & Yip, V. (2015). A corpus study of the acquisition of ba and bei constructions in Mandarin. Paper presented at The International Symposium on Psycholinguistics of Second Language Acquisition and Bilingualism, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

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

Project Description

The Tong corpus is part of a larger study covering the naturalistic interactions between a Mandarin-speaking child Tong and his caregivers from age 1;0 to 4;5. Tong was raised in Shenzhen, China where Mandarin is the language of the community. Members of the family all speak Mandarin to the child. The child is also exposed to some input in Rudong dialect, a variety of Jianghuai Mandarin spoken in Jiangsu province, China, as his father and grandmother sometimes speak the dialect between them. From 2;5 on, the child also received some Cantonese and English input in his kindergarten. However, the influence of these languages was at a minimum level, and the child only spoke Mandarin at home. From 3;3, for three hours a day he attended a kindergarten in Hong Kong which used Cantonese as the medium of instruction.

Recording and transcription

Table 1. Information about the Tong corpus released in CHILDES

No.	File name	Age	No. of utterances	No. of words	MLU
1	130202	1;7.18	101	168	1.66
2	130309	1;8.22	428	1020	2.38
3	130405	1;9.19	406	1089	2.68
4	130504	1;10.17	382	1054	2.76
5	130607	1;11.21	445	1265	2.84
6	130705	2;0.19	376	1119	2.98
7	130802	2;1.17	507	1500	2.96
8	130901	2;2.16	294	1094	3.72
9	130929	2;3.14	430	1586	3.69
10	131103	2;4.16	489	1935	3.96
11	131215	2;5.30	395	1222	3.09
12	131229	2;6.13	398	1580	3.97
13	140203	2;7.19	454	1458	3.21
14	140223	2;8.8	451	1613	3.58
15	140323	2;9.6	303	1032	3.41
16	140423	2;10.6	529	1998	3.78
17	140525	2;11.8	454	1724	3.80
18	140628	3;0.12	466	1948	4.18
19	140726	3;1.10	456	1767	3.88
20	140824	3;2.8	409	1091	2.67
21	140921	3;3.6	496	2306	4.65
22	141025	3;4.9	468	1701	3.64

Table 2: Major parts of speech used in Tong corpus

No.	Category	Code	Example
1	Adjective	adj	小 xiao3 ‘small’
2	Adverb	adv	老 lao3 ‘always’
3	Aspect marker	asp	了 le ‘perfective’
4	Classifier	class	分钟 fen1zhong1 ‘minute’
5	Communicator	co	哎呀 ai1ya1 ‘jeez’
6	Conjunction	conj	不但 bu2dan4 ‘not only’
7	Interjection	int	对不起 dui4bu4qi3 ‘sorry’
8	Noun	n	鱼 yu2 ‘fish’
9	Negation	neg	不 bu4 ‘not’
10	Number	num	八 ba1 'eight'
11	Onomatopoeia	on	轰隆 hong1long2 ‘rumble’
12	Postposition	post	后面hou4mian4 ‘behind’
13	Preposition	prep	从 cong2 ‘from’
14	Pronoun	pro	我 wo3 ‘I’
15	Quantifier	quant	各 ge4 ‘each’
16	Sentence final particle	sfp	吗 ma ‘question’
17	Small (functional) words	small	的 de
18	Verb	v	逛 guang4 ‘hang out’

For more details, please refer to Deng & Yip (in press), or our website http://cbrchk.org/the-tong-corpus/.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to Brian MacWhinney, Director of CHILDES for his expertise, advice and technical support in constructing the Tong corpus.

Our special thanks go to the transcribers of the Tong corpus: Zhong Jing, Lam Ho Ching, Xie Shanrong, Zhou Jiangling, Lu Yaqiao, Lyu Lu, Yao Yao, Au Chui Yee, and Zhishu Yu. We gratefully acknowledge the support of our lab members, especially Stephen Matthews and Mai Ziyin.

The research was supported by a start-up grant to set up the Bilingualism and Language Disorders Laboratory at the CUHK-Shenzhen Research Institute, CUHK funding for the CUHK-Peking University-University System of Taiwan Joint Research Centre for Language and Human Complexity, a General Research Fund from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (Project no. 14413514), and the Stella and Leanne Lu Fund.