CHILDES Clinical Spanish CORDIS Corpus

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Project Description

These data are a small part of a larger corpus, contributed by the Promiva Foundation. The members of the research team are Teresa Fernández de Vega Losada (psychologist), Elena Cabeza Pereiro (linguist), Gema García Marcos and Sara Llena Díaz (speech therapists) who are collecting the corpus at the Virgen de Lourdes School – a Special Education school for children and youngsters with mental retardation (disorder defined according to DSM-IV).

The data concerns mental retarded population (52 subjects) aged from 10 to 21 with three levels of intellectual impairment: severe, moderate and mild. The subjects have concurrent deficits in communicative and linguistic areas. The recruitment procedure used no pre-established criteria; all of the subjects are in the school population with special needs educational support. Over time, we hope to collect a sample of around 160-200 mentally retarded children and youngsters.

This directory contains transcripts of two types of oral narrative tasks, both in a story telling condition. Narrative studies have been reviewed (Martha Shiro, Labov and Conti-Ramsden) to perform the requests:
1. Fictional narrative, structured prompt (gem: “nfs”): the student was shown a wordless video (Pfizer Graffiti, Pfizer Commercial, 2008) and asked to tell the story.
2. Fictional narrative, open-ended prompt (gem: “nfo”): the student was asked to tell the story of a favourite film, video or TV program.
The session was videorecorded and transcribed in CHAT. The transcriptions were verified by additional transcribers.

The aim of these data is to provide the basis for studies about linguistic and narrative aspects of this special population. The analyses will concern different subsystems for language: phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and paralinguistics (gestures, eye contact, body posture, etc.).

This corpus is important because:

• Many subjects are included.
• There is a wide range of mental retardation levels included.
• The population covers a large age range from 10 to 21.
• There is a matched number of boys and girls.
• The tasks are ecologically valid and diverse.
• It permits cross-section analyses.
• These corpus can be linked to other available measures on these subjects.

Usage Restrictions

We request that anyone making any use of these data contact us through email to grupolcvl@gmail.com before using the data in any way, so that we can make sure that the nature of the data are fully understood, that the use and interpretation are appropriate, and that the privacy rights of the subjects are respected.