CHILDES English-Persian-Hungarian Navracsics Corpus

Judit Navracsics Department of Applied Linguistics Veszprém University

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Citation information

Navracsics, J. (1999). The Acquisition of Hungarian by Trilingual Children (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Veszprém-Pécs.

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

Project Description

This directory contains a longitudinal corpus of a pair of siblings acquiring English and Persian as their first two languages from birth and Hungarian as an early second language. In the focus is the children's Hungarian development. The corpus was contributed by Judit Navracsics, University of Veszprém, Hungary. The data are in CHAT format.

The subjects of this study are a pair of siblings, named Nasim (a girl) and Nabil (a boy), who were exposed to English and Persian from birth. Until the age of three and two, respectively, the children lived with their parents in Canada. Then, in 1994 the family moved to Hungary. The parents started teaching at the University of Veszprém, and the children started attending a Hungarian monolingual nursery school, where their Hungarian early second language acquisition started. The parents addressed the children in English as a rule, though, when the mother was alone with them, she used Persian. In Hungarian communities the children used only Hungarian, never brought their other two languages in any kind of speech activities. Their Hungarian development was very rapid and resembled that of Hungarian monolingual children. After 1;6 years Hungarian became the dominant language for the children, they used it between, themselves when playing alone. Code-switching happened only when either of the parents appeared in the room. During the two years of observation the children stayed in Hungary and were addressed in English apart from their parents only by some visiting relatives occasionally, and some friends in Hungary.

In total, 30 hours of recordings were made: 8 hours of video and 22 hours of audio. Data collection was carried out first in the children's home while the children were playing with the investigator. The investigator used her native Hungarian with the children, only at the very beginning of the observation (i.e. two months after their arrival in Hungary) occurred code-switching to English. However, the investigator used English with the parents in the presence of the children. The recordings took place at two week intervals in the first year. After one year the family moved to another Hungarian town. Since then students of the University of Veszprém traveled to visit the family at three months intervals to collect data. The students also followed the communication pattern mentioned above, i.e. they used English with the parents and Hungarian with the children. There are some recordings where the children play with each other without an investigator or a playmate.

All children-adult interactions were transcribed in full, including repetitions, hesitations, child language forms of utterances, even nonsense utterances. Short conversations with the parents which are concerning the topic are also transcribed but longer ones are exluded.

The following table lists the ages at which each recording session took place with reference to the time allocation, the investigator (interlocutor) and the Matrix Language. The language mode is always bilingual or rather trilingual, since the children share the three languages.

No.	Date	Min	Nasim	Nabil	Interloc.	L
1	7/10/1994	13	3; 0,5	2; 0,3	mother	Eng.
2	14/10/1994	10	3; 0,22	2; 0,10	mother	Eng.
3	21/10/1994	25	3; 0,29	2; 0,17	Zsuzsi	Hung.
4	28/10/1994	50	3; 1,6	2; 0,24	Zsuzsi	Hung.
5	5/11/1994	25	3; 1,14	2; 1,1	Zsuzsi	Hung.
6	10/11/1994	40	3; 1,19	2; 1,6	Ildikó	Hung.
7	23/2/1995	60	3; 5,1	2; 4,19	Judit, Zsolt	Hung.
8	9/3/1995	30	3; 5,14	2; 5,5	Judit	Hung.
9	16/3/1995	60	3; 5,21	2; 5,12	Judit	Hung.
10	30/3/1995	45	3; 6,8	2; 5,26	Judit	Hung.
11	6/4/1995	30	3; 6,15	2; 6,2	Judit, Robi	Hung
12	11/4/1995	20	3; 6,20	2; 6,7	mother	Eng.
13	13/4/1995	50	3;6,22	2; 6,9	Judit	Hung.
14	16/4/1995	55	3;6,25	2; 6,12	Judit, sons	Hung.
15	26/4/1995	10	3;7,4	2; 6,22	Zsolt	Hung.
16	3/5/1995	60	3;7,11	2; 6,29	Judit	Hung.
17	31/5/1995	30	3;8,9	2; 7,25	Judit	Hung.
18	25/6/1995	40	3;9,3	2; 8,21	Judit	Hung.
19	27/6/1995	25	3;9,5	2; 8,23	Judit	Hung.
20	15/7/1995	20	3;9,23	2; 9,11	Judit	Hung.
21	26/7/1995	45	3;10,4	2; 9,22	Judit	Hung.
22	15/12/1995	45	4; 2,23	3; 2,21	Borika,Bori	Hung.
23	25/12/1995	15	4; 3,3	3; 2,21	mother	Eng.
24	25/12/1995	30	4; 3,3	3; 2,21		Hung.
25	10/6/1996	10	4; 8,19	3; 8,6	Judit	Hung.
26	20/6/1996	50	4; 8.29	3; 8,16		Hung.
27	20/9/1996	120	4;11,29	3;11,16	Hajni, Anna	Hung.
28	1/12/1996	120	5; 2,9	4; 1,27	Hajni, Anna	Hung.
29	20/4/1997	120	5; 6,29	4; 6,16	Hajni, Anna	Hung.
30	20/4/1997	30	5; 6,29	4; 6,16	Hajni, Anna	Hung.

Acknowledgements