CHILDES Clinical Cantonese HongKong-SLI Corpus

Anita Mei-Yin Wong Speech Pathology University of Sydney

Paul Fletcher Speech and Hearing Sciences University College Cork

Laurence Leonard Speech, Language, and Hearing Purdue University

Stephanie Stokes -- --

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Citation information

Wong, A. M.-Y. (2023). Understanding development and disorder in Cantonese using language sample analysis (ISBN: 978-0-367-42419-0) London: Routledge.

Wong, A. M.-Y., Klee, T., Stokes, S. F., Fletcher, P., Leonard, L. B. (2010) Differentiating Cantonese-speaking pre-school children with and without SLI using MLU and lexical diversity (D). Journal of Speech. Language and Hearing Research, 53, 794-799.

Fletcher, P., Leonard, L. B., Stokes, S. F., Wong, A. M.-Y. (2009). Morphosyntactic Deficits in Cantonese-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment. In S. P. Law, B. S. Weekes, & A. M.-Y. Wong (Eds.). Language disorders in speakers of Chinese (pp. 75 –88). Bristol, UK: Multilingual matters.

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

In the corpus, there are three groups of children: SLI, TD_AM and TD-Y. There are 15, 15 and 17 children in each group respectively. Audio files are not available for all the children in the groups. The beginning of each child’s audio file and transcript are not necessarily aligned. Not all utterances in the audio samples are transcribed.

The 47 language samples were collected as part of a NIH funded project examining the manifestation of SLI in Cantonese from 2001 to 2003 in Hong Kong, SAR, China. There were 100 utterances in each sample. Single word responses to questions and words of exclamation were marked for exclusion in the calculation of MLUs.

SLI was defined according to definitions summarized in Leonard (2014), where children with SLI received a nonverbal IQ score that was no lower than -1 SD. All 15 children with SLI were referred by a speech-language pathologist as having language disorders and their SLI status was confirmed by the research team using a comprehensive assessment protocol. The language status of the other 32 typically developing children was also confirmed through assessment by a speech-language pathologist.

The 15 children with SLI were between 4;02 to 6;07 and 12 were boys and 3 were girls. There were two groups of typically developing children: typically developing age-matched (TD_AM) and young typically developing children (TD_Y) who were individually matched with children in the SLI group on receptive language scores on the Reynell Developmental Language Scales (RDLS: Reynell & Huntley, 1985; Cantonese version, 1987). There were 15 children in the TD-AM group aged between 4;01 to 6;09, and 11 were boys and 4 were girls. There were 17 children in the TD_Y group aged between 2;11 to 4;06, and 4 were boys and 13 were girls.

Reynell, J., & Huntley, M. (1987). Reynell Developmental Language Scales: Cantonese Version. Windsor: NEFR-Nelson.

Forty-five of these 47 children were included in a set of five studies by the research team. Please refer to Fletcher et al. (2005) or any of these studies for details about the assessment they received for confirmation of their language status.

Fletcher, P., Leonard, L. B., Stokes, S. F., & Wong, A. M.-Y. (2005). The expression of aspect in Cantonese-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 48, 621-634.

The Linguistic Society Hong Kong Cantonese Romanization Scheme (1997) was used to represent Cantonese words in the samples. The number at the end of each syllable denotes one of the six lexical tones.