CHILDES Spanish-English Hoff Corpus

Erika Hoff Department of Psychology Florida Atlantic University erikachoff@gmail.com website

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Citation information

Tulloch, M. K. & Hoff, E. (2022). Filling lexical gaps and more: Code-switching for the power of expression by young bilinguals. Journal of Child Language. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000307

Shiro, M., Hoff, E., & Ribot, K. M. (2020). Cultural differences in the content of child talk: Evaluative lexis of English monolingual and Spanish-English bilingual 30-month-olds. Journal of Child Language, 47, 884-869. doi:10.1017/S0305000919000990

Hoff, E., Core, C., & Shanks, K. F. (2020). The quality of child-directed speech depends on the speaker’s language proficiency. Journal of Child Language, 47, 132-145. https://doi.org/10.1017/S030500091900028X

Limia, V. D., Özçalışkan, Ş., Hoff, E. (2019). Do parents provide a helping hand to vocabulary development in bilingual children? Journal of Child Language, 46, 501-521. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000918000594

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

Selected papers from the larger project

Lauro, J., Core, C., & Hoff, E. (2020). Explaining individual differences in trajectories of simultaneous bilingual development: Contributions of child and environmental factors. Child Development. 91, 2063-2082. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13409

Hoff, E., Tulloch, M. K., & Core, C. (2021). Profiles of majority-minority language proficiency in 5-year-olds. Child Development, 92(5), 1801-1816. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.13591

Participants

At 2;6, there are 71 bilingual children for whom there are transcripts of Spanish and English interactions. Usually, the caregiver is the same bilingual mother in both interactions, but sometimes the caregiver for the Spanish and English recordings differ. This information is available in the attached data file. which lists the variables included on the tab marked "requested variables". There are 11 children with transcripts only for Spanish interactions. There are transcripts for 23 English monolingual mothers and children recorded at 2;6.

At 3;0, 29 of the bilingual children have transcripts in Spanish and English. There are 19 transcripts of English monolingual children and their caregivers.

At 3;6, there are Spanish and English transcripts for 39 bilingual children and 9 children for whom there are only Spanish transcripts. There are 17 English monolingual children with transcripts at 3 ½.

Files number 013-145 are from an R21. Files number 400-460 are from an R01.

Project Description

These transcripts and video files are samples of Spanish and English caregiver (almost always mother)-child interaction collected at child ages 2 ½, 3, and 3 ½ years as part of a 10-year longitudinal study of the language and literacy development of U.S.-born children raised in Spanish-speaking homes. Each recording is approximately 30 minutes in length. The caregiver and target child are provided with 2 different sets of toys and then with books, each for 10 minutes. The bilingual caregivers, who report that they interact with the child in both languages on a regular basis, are recorded twice—once under the instruction to speak only Spanish and once under the instruction to speak only English. The caregivers comply-- the children not so much. This codeswitching is the topic of Tulloch and Hoff (2022). Most of the recordings were collected in the participants’ homes; approximately 15% were collected in a laboratory playroom.

The examiners were fully bilingual. The caregivers were instructed to play with their child the way they normally play. The parents are instructed that there are 3 bags for each 10 minutes of the interaction. The bags are placed in the parent’s reach, in the following order: animals, followed by picnic foods, and lastly books. (English and Spanish language versions of the same 3 books were used: Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, Goodnight Moon, and Big Red Barn. We tell the parents that we will signal them once each of the 10 minutes are up so that they may clean up and switch to the next bag.

All transcribers of Spanish were native Spanish speakers; transcribers of English were native English speakers or native bilinguals. Transcribers were trained to a criterion of at least 90% accuracy, counted on an utterance-by-utterance basis with a common transcript that had been reviewed by multiple transcribers. All utterances were coded in the transcripts as spoken in Spanish ([-spa]), English ([-eng]), a mixture of both ([-mix]), or unassigned ([-una]).

Acknowledgements