CHILDES Dutch-English De Houwer Corpus

Annick De Houwer Director Harmonious Bilingualism Network (HaBilNet) annick.dehouwer@habilnet.org website

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Citation information

Publications using these data should cite:

De Houwer, A. (1987) Two at a Time: An Exploration of How Children Acquire Two Languages from Birth. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

De Houwer, A. (1990). The acquisition of two languages from birth: A case study. Cambridge University Press.

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

Additional references include:

De Houwer, A. (1997).The role of input in the acquisition of past verb forms in English and Dutch: evidence from a bilingual child. In E. Clark, (Ed.), Proceedings of the 28th Stanford Child Language Research Forum, Stanford, USA: CSLI, 153-162.

De Houwer, A. (1994). The Separate Development Hypothesis: method and implications. In G. Extra & L. Verhoeven, (Eds.), The Cross-Linguistic Study of Bilingual Development, Amsterdam, the Netherlands: North-Holland, 39-50.

De Houwer, A. (1987). Gender marking in a young Dutch-English bilingual child. In: Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar, York, UK: University of York, 53-65.

De Houwer, A. (1984a). Repairs and the use of the monitor in early second language acquisition. In H. Krenn, J. Niemeyer & U. Eberhardt (Eds.), Sprache und Gesellschaft. Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 130-142.

De Houwer, A. (1984b). The development of the verb phrase in a bilingual child. In D. Singleton & D. Little (Eds.), Language Learning in Formal and Informal Contexts. Dublin, Ireland: IRAAL, 41-53.

De Houwer, A. (1984c). Mezcla de códigos en el habla de una niña de tres años bilingüe en inglés y holandés. In M. Siguan (Ed.), Adquisición Precoz de una Segunda Lengua. Barcelona, Spain: Publicacions i edicions de la universitat de Barcelona, 87-102.

De Houwer, A. (1984d). Repetition in the speech of a three-year-old bilingual. In J. Den Haese & J. Nivette, (Eds.), Aila Brussels 84. Proceedings. Brussels, Belgium: University of Brussels, 361-362.

De Houwer, A. (1983). Some aspects of the simultaneous acquisition of Dutch and English by a three-year-old child. Nottingham Linguistic Circular, 12, 106-129.

Introduction & Background

The child featured in this corpus is an only child who we will call Kate. Kate’s first exposure to Dutch and English occurred within the period of a week after her birth, and exposure to two languages was regular up to and including the period of investigation.

Kate was born of an American mother and a Flemish father in a hospital near Antwerp, Belgium, where the language used by the nursing staff in conversations with patients is a standard-like variety of Dutch as spoken in Flanders. Kate roomed in with her English-speaking mother, who stayed in hospital for a week. Kate’s Dutch-speaking father was present at the birth and afterwards visited daily. In her first days of life, Kate heard English spoken to her by her mother, and Dutch by her father and various members of the nursing staff. Thus, first exposure to two languages occurred within the period of a week.

Kate lived with both her parents up to and including the period of investigation and was usually addressed in a different language by each parent. Apart from short intervals when one of the parents was away on a trip, or when both Kate and her mother were in the United States without Kate’s father, exposure to two languages was a pseudo-daily occurrence. Kate’s mother, who is also her most regular care-giver, almost always addresses Kate in mainstream American English with a slight Midwestern accent. The term “mainstream American English” here is meant to refer to that variety of English that on the morphosyntactic level is not substantially different from the type of language used on national United States television. Kate’s father almost always addressed Kate in standard Dutch with a slight Ghent accent. The term “standard Dutch” here refers to the supraregional variant of the language spoken in the Belgian region of Flanders and in most of the Netherlands.

Both parents are university graduates and hold prestigious jobs: Kate’s mother was a part-time free-lance journalist for a variety of international publications, and Kate’s father was a university professor. Kate’s social background thus could be described as upper middle class. Kate’s parents spoke English with each other, because Kate’s mother spoke a heavily accented, often ungrammatical Dutch (she understood a lot more than she could produce herself), whereas Kate’s father spoke English with a close to native competence.

At the beginning of the study, Kate’s mother was asked to fill out a form with questions about the child’s language background up to the time of the study. The information obtained is represented below.

1. Countries visited by Kate

Age	Country	Duration
birth-0;4	Belgium (Antwerp)	3 months
0;4-0;9	Australia (Canberra)	6 months
0;10-0;10	USA and Great Britain	3 weeks
0;10-1;6	Belgium (Antwerp)	8 months
1;7-1;8	USA	5 weeks
1;8-2;5	Belgium (Antwerp)	9 months
2;5-2;5	USA	2 weeks
2;6-3;4	Belgium (Antwerp)	11 months

The family’s home base was mostly Antwerp, a large city in Belgium with much international activity mainly due to the presence of a major seaport and a large diamond industry. Many languages are spoken in the streets but the language of the local inhabitants is a distinct local dialect that is significantly different from standard Dutch on the phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic levels. Kate had little contact with speakers of this Antwerp dialect, and it can be said to be of little importance in a discussion of her language background. Before the age of 3;4, Kate spent 8 months in an English-speaking country compared to about 2 years and 7 months in a Dutch-speaking region. The local environment was thus mainly Dutch-speaking. The type of Dutch that nonrelatives (including peers) would tend to use with Kate is fairly standard, with regionally colored accents. The media use standard Dutch. In the English-speaking environments, Kate was exposed to a variety of regional dialects ranging from Australian to British to American.

On weekdays, English was heard by the child much more often than Dutch, with an average of about 10 hours of English versus about 4 hours of Dutch a day. This was mainly due to the fact that Kate went to an English-speaking preschool, a small private school with a low pupil to teacher ratio. Before Kate started going to school at age 2;6, the input for both languages on week-days was about equal: for three mornings a week she was cared for by a Dutch-speaking neighbor.

On weekends, Dutch was heard more often than English, because Kate’s father spends more time with her then, and this is mostly the time when the grandparents were present. Also visits to Dutch-speaking acquaintances and friends tended to take place on the weekends. Kate occasionally spent a week alone with her monolingual Dutch-speaking grand-parents in the holidays or during the school-term when her parents were away on business trips.

2. Kate's language environment (2;5 - 3;4)

Input type	Language	Frequency
mother	English	average 6 hrs. a day
father	Dutch	average 4.5 hrs. a day
paternal grandparents	Dutch	average 5 days a month
neighbor baby-sitter	Dutch	irregularly
most visitors	English	average 5 hrs. a week
some visitors	Dutch	irregularly
most people visited	English	average 5 hrs. a week
some people visited	Dutch	irregularly
peers outside school	Dutch	irregularly
preschool	English	average 20 hrs. a week
playgroup	English	3 hrs. a week
television	Dutch & English	average 1 hour a day
shops and services	Dutch	short periods daily

On the whole, it might be said that for the period from 2;5 to 3;4, Kate had slightly more contact with English than with Dutch. For both languages, she was exposed to a wide variety of accents. Most of the people that Kate met addressed her in only one language, and certainly her caregivers used mainly one language with her. Kate had thus grown up in a one person/one language situation.

On the information form filled out by her mother, Kate was described as a talkative child “in both languages.” From my own observation of the child I can confirm this. In addition, Kate was a healthy child with no history of hospitalization or illnesses. She had never had to stay away from school because of a cold or other ailment. Kate was used to meeting a lot of different people from various ethnic backgrounds and was not shy in communicating with them. There is no reason to assume that she is exceptionally intelligent or has lower than normal intelligence. Finally, a word should be said about the attitudes in the child’s environment towards her developing bilingualism. Although no formal investigation of this issue was carried out, informal observation during the study, as well as before and after it, showed there to be strong negative or positive attitudes present. Rather, the child’s bilingualism at the age period studied seemed to be accepted by the environment at large as a matter of course, which was not commented on in either positive or negative terms. Kate’s parents themselves only mentioned their daughter’s bilingualism to outsiders when they were proudly recounting her “bilingual jokes.” Bilingual individuals who were in regular contact with the child, however, were made aware by Kate’s parents that they preferred that person to use mainly one language with her.

Data collection & transcription

The data that form the core of the Kate corpus were collected independently from any institution using personal funds while the investigator, who had been trained as a linguist specializing in Dutch and English linguistics and held a Master’s degree in Germanic Philology, was enrolled in a one-year graduate program in Psycholinguistics at the University of Leuven, Belgium. The data were transcribed as soon as possible after data collection using a typewriter. At the time of data collection no real plan existed as to what was going to happen with these data, and at the time the investigator had only a superficial knowledge of the field of child language. This soon changed after the investigator spent the year after data collection as an independent graduate student at Stanford University, studying mainly under Professor Eve Clark. When the investigator returned to Belgium she decided to use Kate’s data as a basis for a doctoral thesis on bilingual children’s language acquisition. This thesis was prepared over a 6-year period while the investigator was a lecturer in English linguistics at the Free University of Brussels, Belgium. The advisor was Professor Hugo Baetens Beardsmore of the Free University of Brussels, who is a specialist on bilingualism. During the summer and fall of 1990, the computerized corpus was transferred to CHAT format and the adult utterances from the original transcript were added to the computerized corpus. The investigator did this work while she was a Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University.

The investigator (INV) first met Kate about 6 months before data collection began and was in regular contact with her after the initial meeting. The child saw INV as a close friend of the family’s and seemed to feel totally at ease with her. The investigator, a native speaker of Dutch, used Dutch with Kate most of the time throughout the initial acquaintanceship and the recording period. When data collection began, the child was not aware that her language use was of any particular interest to INV. There was no observable difference between Kate’s behavior towards INV before data collection began and afterwards.

In total, 19 one-hour recordings were made. The age period studied covers the eight months from 2;7 to 3;4. Although the aim was to make one recording a week, the sessions ended up being irregularly spaced due to the family’s unexpected absences or visitors which made data collection impossible. Data collection was carried out in the child’s home using a good quality portable cassette-recorder with a built-in multidirectional microphone. This recorder was placed on the floor or on a table close to where interaction was taking place and received little interest from the child, except on some infrequent occasions when INV or Kate’s mother was asked to “turn the music on.” There is no reason to believe that the interaction was influenced by the presence of the recorder.

The tapes were transcribed orthographically by the investigator as soon as possible after their recording. Contextual information was added from memory where deemed necessary for later disambiguation. Unfortunately much needed contextual information is still lacking, so that interactions are sometimes uninterpretable. In reformatting the corpus into CHAT, overlap information was omitted altogether, and bits of IPA transcriptions were translated into UNIBET.

All child-adult interactions were transcribed in full (including hesitations, false starts, repetitions, self–made songs, and nonsense utterances). Extended conversations between the adults that did not include the child in any way were not transcribed (this was indicated by a comment), but all other adult utterances were included in the transcription. The adult utterances in the corpus should be interpreted as being addressed to the child or to the child and the other adult(s) present unless specifically noted otherwise. The boundaries of both child and adult utterances were determined intuitively on the basis of intonation contours (this procedure is unfortunately far from ideal). Utterances were separated from one another using full stops unless there was clear question intonation (in which case a question mark was used), or unless the utterance was uttered in a fairly loud and/or excited voice (in which case an exclamation point was used).

The transcriber was trained in linguistics and phonetics and was quite proficient in both the language varieties that Kate was exposed to. Every effort was made to carry out the transcriptions as meticulously as possible, but for practical and financial reasons it was unfortunately impossible to engage a second transcriber for verification purposes.

The recording sessions

The overall description of the recording sessions is given in this table:

3. Kate recording sessions

Tape	Age	Dutch	English	Mixed	NLS	Totals
1	2;7.12	68.8	23.4	7.8	0.0	77
2	2;7.17	42.7	38.2	18.8	0.3	335
3	2;8.8	45.9	27.0	21.6	5.4	37
4	2;9.0	94.7	0.5	3.2	1.6	374
5	2;10.5	60.8	36.6	0.9	1.7	232
6	2;10.13	95.8	0.4	3.6	0.2	527
7	2;10.28	69.3	26.1	4.1	0.4	241
8	2;11.14	72.5	20.8	6.7	0.0	284
9	3;0.6	52.3	38.6	9.1	0.0	88
10	3;0.11	52.3	36.2	11.5	0.0	130
11	3;0.17	16.2	68.4	15.4	0.0	117
12	3;1.6	45.2	48.8	6.0	0.0	84
13	3;1.12	52.7	45.1	2.2	0.0	91
14	3;1.13	5.2	85.8	6.7	2.2	134
15	3;1.18	10.7	77.2	5.4	6.7	224
16	3;1.26	53.5	36.0	3.5	7.0	258
17	3;2.7	55.9	38.8	3.3	2.0	245
18	3;3.9	88.3	1.1	5.5	5.1	274
19	3;3.16	89.3	2.6	7.9	0.3	392
Totals		65.2	26.5	6.5	1.7	4144

Frequently, interactions were recorded while Kate was playing with INV in the kitchen and Kate’s mother was cooking. Thus, at most of the recording sessions both languages were present, but because MOT was busy cooking and INV was usually Kate’s focus of attention (after all, INV was there “to play with her,” as MOT frequently told Kate), interactions between MOT and Kate were rather less frequent than interactions between INV and Kate. On many of the tapes, then, there are three speakers present, and each of these may interact with either one of the others. This situation, by the way, was quite usual in Kate’s life: her parents had visitors almost daily, and the very hospitable atmosphere in Kate’s house meant that more often than not, a visitor stayed for lunch or dinner.

Favorite games played during the recording sessions included “flying,” in which Kate would repeatedly ask INV to lift her high up in the air; playing with an animal farm; pre-tending to be a lion or some other animal; making pretend “dinner” and “tea”; and naming colors. In MOT’s interactions with Kate during the recording sessions discussions of past and future events featured prominently (again nothing unusual in Kate’s life: every day before going to bed Kate had a conversation with MOT about the events of that day or the next). Other interaction between Kate and her mother frequently concerned the eating or preparing of food. There are not many examples of playing between Kate and her mother. As MOT has reported to INV, she does not usually play with Kate, except when Kate needs someone to give pretend “tea” or “dinner” to.

There were a few recording sessions where Kate’s father (FAT) was present as well. In addition, Kate’s aunt Elaine, her grandparents, and a colleague of her father’s were present at some sessions. Overall, the data consist of mainly Dutch interactions between Kate and INV, and mainly English interactions between Kate and MOT. The language used between INV and MOT is English.

The table below lists the main activities that Kate engaged in during the recording sessions, together with an indication of who the major interacting adult was for each activity and which language they tended to use in addressing the child.

4. Kate's activities and interlocutors

Tape	Activity	Person	Language
1	Naming colors	INV	Dutch
	General conversation	INV	Dutch
2	Recounting a visit	INV	Dutch
	Arranging cushions	INV	Dutch
	Naming colors	INV	Dutch
	Discussing imaginary events	MOT	English
3	Acting out boating scene	INV	Dutch
4	Pretending to be cooking	INV	Dutch
	Pretending to be sleeping	INV	Dutch
	Pretending to be a sick lion	INV	Dutch
	Pretending to shoot a bird	INV	Dutch
5	Requesting candy	MOT	English
	Being thrown up in the air	FAT/INV	Dutch
	Hiding game		Dutch
	Pretending to be a fish	INV	Dutch
6	Playing with animal farm	INV	Dutch
	Singing		Dutch
	General conversation	INV	Dutch
	Pretending to an animal	INV	Dutch
7	Discussing school events	INV/MOT	Dutch
	Discussing museum	INV/MOT	English/Dutch
	Singing	INV	Dutch
	Requesting and insisting	MOT	English
	Pretending to be a rooster	INV	Dutch
8	Drawing	FAT/INV	Dutch
	Making and serving	MOT/INV	English/Dutch
	Requesting and insisting	MOT	English
	Playing with animal farm	INV	Dutch
9	Naming colors	INV	Dutch
	Playing with a doll	INV	Dutch
	Requesting food stuffs	MOT	English
10	Playing in the bath tub	INV	Dutch
	Getting dressed	MOT	English
11	Discussing past events	MOT/INV	English/Dutch
	Joking around		English/Dutch
	Making and serving	MOT/INV	English/Dutch
12	Playing in the bath tub	MOT/INV	English/Dutch
	Getting dressed	MOT	English
	Discussing food	MOT	English
13	Discussing a trip	MOT/INV	English/Dutch
	Discussing the weekend	MOT/INV	English/Dutch
	“Helping” M prepare food	MOT	English
	Discussing food	FAT	Dutch
14	Making matches “dance”	MOT	English
	Learning about food stuffs	MOT	English
	Learning about cooking	MOT	English
	Singing		English
	General conversation	MOT	English
	Chattering nonsense	FAT	Dutch
15	Discussing school events	MOT	English
	General conversation	MOT	English
	Requesting food stuffs	MOT	English
	Riding tricycle		English
	Discussing upcoming trip	MOT	English
	Discussing trip to the seaside	INV	Dutch
	Bedtime monologue	-	-
16	Being thrown up in the air	INV	Dutch
	Hiding game		Dutch
	Naming colors	INV	Dutch
	Requesting food stuffs	MOT	English
	General conversation	MOT	English
17	General conversation	MOT	English
	Cutting up strawberries	INV	Dutch
	Requesting food to cut up	MOT	English
18	Playing at “dinner”	FAT/INV	Dutch
	Discussing school event	INV	Dutch
	Conversation and joking	FAT/INV	Dutch
19	Hiding games	FAT/INV	Dutch
	Playing with a ball	FAT/INV	Dutch
	General conversation	FAT/INV	Dutch
	Pretend dinner	FAT/INV	Dutch
	Discussing upcoming trip	FAT/INV	Dutch

The author of this corpus will be happy to provide researchers who want to use this corpus with a coded version that includes a language identification code for each child utterance, as well as morphological and syntactic codes developed by the author.