CHILDES Mandarin Chang1 Corpus

Chien-ju Chang Human Development National Taiwan Normal University changch2@ntnu.edu.tw

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Citation information

Reference for the study conducted by Hemphill and her research team is:
Hemphill, L., Feldman, H. M., Camp, L., Griffin, T. M., Miranda, A. B., & Wolf, D. P. (1994). Developmental changes in narrative and non-narrative discourse in children with and without brain injury. Journal of Communication Disorders, 27 (2), 107-133.

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 project aims to examine (1) the linguistic resources young Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use to tell a coherent play narrative while marking shifts between "there and then" and "here and now" talk in replica play and (2) the developmental shifts between ages four and six in the ability to establish and maintain a coherent play narrative.

This corpus includes transcripts of 2 groups of children, one group of 12 four-year-olds (mean age: 4;1, age range: 3;6-4;5) and one group of six-year-olds (mean age: 6;0, age range: 5;7-6;5). The children were recruited from a kindergarten in Hsinchu, Taiwan and interviewed individually in the library at school. This project followed the same procedures employed in Hemphill's study (Hemphill et al., 1994) to investigate Mandarin-speaking children's narrative skill: the children were presented with a set of toy animals and props and asked to set up a jungle and to continue the story after provision of two narrative prompts.

The whole process of performing the task was audio taped and video taped. The CHAT conventions were used to transcribe all language and corresponding actions from the audio and video tapes in Chinese characters. Each child's speech was broken down into clauses using [^c] as a clause marker and coded from the first narrative prompt until the end of the text.

Filename	Child's name	Age	Gender
001RPJ	愛華	6;5	Female
002RPJ	建華	6;1	Male
003RPJ	凱麗	5;7	Female
004RPJ	志強	5;11	Male
005RPJ	蘭欣	6;2	Female
006RPJ	德志	6;5	Female
007RPJ	格力	5;11	Male
008RPJ	倫倫	5;10	Female
009RPJ	安詳	5;7	Male
010RPJ	喜兒	5;9	Female
011RPJ	中立	6;5	Male
012RPJ	至端	5;10	Male
013RPJ	力可	4;0	Male
014RPJ	怡希	4;3	Female
015RPJ	維強	4;4	Male
016RPJ	廷威	4;3	Male
017RPJ	如薇	4;2	Female
018RPJ	舜堯	3;6	Male
019RPJ	庭如	3;11	Female
020RPJ	莉宣	3;11	Female
021RPJ	宜媱	4;1	Female
022RPJ	松仰	4;5	Male
023RPJ	揚志	3;10	Male
024RPJ	凱松	3;10	Female

Acknowledgements