CHILDES Hungarian-Spanish-Catalan Biró Corpus


Andrea Biró
Translation and Language Sciences
University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona

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Participants: 1
Type of Study: longitudinal, naturalistic
Location: Spain, Hungary
Media type: video
DOI: doi:10.21415/C30A-VF30

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Citation information

Biró, A. (2017). El sujeto y la cópula en la adquisición trilingüe del húngaro-español-catalán (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

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Project Description

This corpus documents the language acquisition of trilingual girl, Sara, exposed to both Hungarian and Spanish regularly from birth and to Catalan from 1 year of age. Sara was born in Catalonia, Spain on February 3, 2011. The mother is a native speaker of Hungarian and the father is a native speaker of Colombian Spanish. Both parents possess university studies. The mother speaks Spanish at an advanced level, as well as Catalan at a high level. The father understands and speaks Catalan at an advanced level and understands Hungarian at a basic level but does not speak it. Sara’s parents are a bilingual / monolingual couple where the mother speaks in Spanish with the father of the girl and in Hungarian, her mother tongue, with her daughter. The father always speaks in Spanish with both his daughter and his wife. Parents try to follow the one person / one language model. Sara was exposed to Hungarian and Spanish languages from birth, and to Catalan from 1;0 year old when she began attending a nursery school where the vehicular language is Catalan.

Sara’s parents are actively involved in caretaking and the girl’s upbringing. Both feed her, bathe her, play and sing with her and tell her stories. During the week, after school, the girl is with her father; while on weekends she spends more time with the mother. Sara never watches television but usually watches cartoons in Spanish online for approximately half an hour three times a week, and is exposed to the radio in both Spanish and Catalan. She has a lot of CDs with children's songs in the three languages, Hungarian, Spanish and Catalan, and many story books that she usually reads daily with her parents.

Regular recordings with Sara began in October 1, 2012 and ended in September 28, 2014. They cover two years, from 1;7.28 to 3;7.25 years of age and have a duration of more than 55 hours in total. The sessions were recorded in two countries, Spain and Hungary, in two different contexts, food and playtime. Each session was recorded approximately every two weeks for 30 minutes each. A total of 108 video sessions were obtained: 92 in Spain and 16 in Hungary; 93 sessions were recorded in playtime context and 15 in feeding context. The latter were collected from the beginning of the data collection until the age of 2; 3.12. The sessions were always recorded by the adult who interacted with Sara. The first 13 sessions were recorded in two (Hungarian and Spanish) or three (Hungarian, Spanish and Catalan) languages at the same time. From 2 January 2013 (session nº 14), each session was recorded alternating the languages approximately every 15 days. From 11 July 2013 (session nº 30) the sessions were recorded every two weeks in each language (Hungarian, Spanish and Catalan), leaving a day of rest between sessions.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by grants VARIAD (FF12012-35058) and Contact (FFI2016-75082) from the Spanish Ministry of Education to Dr. Aurora Bel Gaya.