CHILDES German Wagner Corpus


Klaus Wagner
Kindersprache
University of Dortmund

website
Participants: 12
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: Germany
Media type: no longer available
DOI: doi:10.21415/T5ZC8K

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Citation information

Wagner, K. R. (1974). Die Sprechsprache des Kindes. Teil 1: Theorie und Analyse. Düsseldorf: Präger.

Wagner, K. R. (1985). How much do children say in a day? Journal of Child Language, 12, 475–487.

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

This directory contains a set of 12 mini-corpora collected by Klaus R. Wagner of the University of Dortmund and his students and coworkers. As indicated in the following table, the ages of the participants ranged from 1;5 to 14;10. Recording took place in Dortmund, Germany. The participants wore a transmitting microphone and were therefore free to move about as they wished. This is of immense importance for studies aiming at eliciting and describing the spontaneous speech of children. Within a radius of 300 meters around the recording ap-paratus, the child can move freely, play, skip, climb trees, drive a go-cart, and so forth. The transcription system is that used in the pilot study (Wagner, 1974) with certain improvements after Ehlich & Rehbein (1976). The transcripts include all the participants’ utterances verbatim, including paralanguage; all interlocutor utterances in full as far as they concern the subject, otherwise abbreviated; and detailed information on the communicative setting (place, action, particular circumstances). The following list gives two further types of information about the corpora: the communication situations in which participants found themselves during recording and parental social status.
  1. Schwarze corpus: Katrin (1;5) 202 minutes. The situations included: breakfast, playing (tap, milk lorry, dolls), helping to sort crockery, playing with bricks and dolls, nappy change, looking at guinea pigs, lunch, and monologues in bed. Social status: mother (researcher) was qualified in child care; father was a parson; upper-middle-class.
  2. Kadatz corpus: Nicole (1;8) 241 minutes. The situations included: waking up, playing and jumping about in parents’ bed, on her potty and getting dressed, breakfast and playing in her high-chair, at the kitchen window, painting, clearing the table, painting and playing with a toy clock, playing with a big doll, playing a board game, on her potty, playing a board game, eating, getting undressed, and monologues in bed. Social status: mother was a sales-woman; father (researcher) was a trainee teacher; upper-working-class.
  3. Wahner corpus: Andreas (2;1) 213 minutes. The situations included: eating a sandwich, playing (metal foil, animals, helicopter, toothbrushes, spinning top), playing with grandfather and Caesar the rabbit (doll), playing with grandfather and a Santa Claus doll, reciting a poem, looking at a picture book with brother and aunt (researcher), playing with a Lego tank, a candle, matches, drinking juice, and playing football with a beachball. Social status: mother stopped working after the birth of her first child (participant’s elder brother); father was a supervisor of apprentices in an electrical workshop and was studying electrical engineering to become an electrical technician; upper working-class or lower-middle-class.
  4. Hoffmann-Kirsch corpus: Carsten (3;6) 189 minutes. The situations included: playing (role-playing, driving a car, “writing” = drawing), cutting up a birthday card, eating chocolate and looking at pictures with grandma, going into the cellar, playing at being a dog, going to the milkman, buying yogurt, eating yogurt, looking at and talking about pictures, having lunch, cuddling and talking to grandma, playing with cars (role-playing), cuddling and talking to his mother (researcher), crying (after being bumped), and being comforted by grandma. Social status: mother (researcher) was a trainee teacher; father was a car salesman; middle-class.
  5. Brinkmann corpus: Gabi (5;4) 152 minutes. The situations included: talking about her brother’s birthday, breakfast, playing dominoes, eating Nutella (chocolate spread), playing dominoes again, and drawing. Social status: mother was a housewife; father was a lawyer; upper-middle-class.
  6. H: The situations included: waiting for the end of break; lessons: understanding things, mathematics, German, understanding things, German composition; break; lesson: braille; end of school, being driven home, arriving at home, collecting Andreas (playmate), and playing with a racing car set. Social status: mother (researcher) was a trainee teacher, entrance qualifications gained through further education, upper working-class or lower middle-class.
  7. Otto corpus: Roman (9;2) 311 minutes. The situations included: playing monopoly with Georg (younger brother), getting ready to go out, at the sports ground, relaxed conversation, playing with little cars, drive to the camp site, at the camp site, going home, going on with the game of monopoly with Georg, watching television (sports program), and playing with rac-ing car set. Social status: mother was a gymnastics teacher; father (researcher) had 12 years in the armed forces as a sergeant and was a trainee teacher; middle-class.
  8. Corzillus/Landskru The situations included: getting up, putting on the microphone transmitter, breakfast, going to school in the car, lessons (drawing, understanding things, mathematics (test), language, reading, singing) with breaks, going home, lunch, playing monopoly, driving a go-cart, playing in a Citroen 2CV, soldering, drawing, making a tassel, collecting food, watching television, and memory game. Social status: mother was a landlady; father (researcher) was a draughtsman who died when participant was 3 years old, upper-working-class.
  9. Wagner corpus: Teresa (9;7) one day. The situations included: waking up, getting dressed, sewing on the microphone transmitter, breakfast, packing her bag, drive to school, before lessons, lessons (arithmetic, language), 10 o’clock break, prizegiving, drive home, clearing things away, reading the mail, Teresa’s file, picking gooseberries, playing with girlfriends (catching the cat, dressing up, clowns, ballet kidnappers), lunch, picking and cleaning gooseberries, homework, having coffee, clearing away toys, playing with Anke (coffee table, climbing a tree, playing on the grass, hopping on the patio, gold investigators, eating, ducat gold thieves), watching television, skipping, having dinner, watching television news, and going to bed. (For a more detailed discussion of speech situations see Wagner (1974: 203-38).) Social status: mother was a teacher for eight years, then housewife; father (researcher) was a secondary school teacher in various school types, later university lecturer; middle-class.
  10. Brunner corpus: Markus (11;4) 188 minutes. The situations included: making a veteran car (toy car made by cutting out and pasting cardboard), and using a microscope. Social status: mother (researcher) was a trainee teacher; father was a certified engineer, architect, professor; upper-middle-class.
  11. Pagels/Gasse corpus: Christiane (12;2) 430 minutes. The situations included: saying hello, making a crib, lunch, continuing work on the crib, skating, playing a word game, doing crochet, having coffee, singing Advent songs, reading aloud, conversation, watching televi-sion, drawing, having dinner, and doing schoolwork. Social status: mother spent 10 years working in business, then housewife; father was a skilled art metal worker, retrained as a teacher of art and vocational preparation at a school for mentally handicapped children; upper working-class or lower-middle-class.