CHILDES Clinical Dutch Zwitserlood Corpus

Rob Zwitserlood HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht Utrecht University rob.zwitserlood@hu.nl

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Citation information

Zwitserlood, R., van Weerdenburg, M., Verhoeven, L., & Wijnen, F. (2015). Development of morphosyntactic accuracy and grammatical complexity in Dutch school-age children with SLI. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 58(June), 891–905. https://doi.org/10.1044/2015_JSLHR-L-14-0015 PhD Thesis:

Zwitserlood, R. (2014). Language growth in Dutch school-age children with specific language impairment (LOT Dissertation Series 356). Utrecht University. Free download at: https://www.lotpublications.nl/Documents/356_fulltext.pdf

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

The dataset consists of the Storytelling Tasks of the Dutch Language Test TAK (Taaltest Alle Kinderen, Language Test All Children) told by Dutch monolingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and Dutch monolingual typically developing (TD) children. The pictures of the stories can be found in the publication cited above.

The stories were audio recorded in WAV and transcribed in CHAT. The transcripts are also coded for silent pause duration in milliseconds, in four duration categories. These categories are described in the headers of all CHAT files. Each CHAT files contains the two TAK stories told in one session to the investigator. They are separated by a @Comments line.

All participating children told the stories three times, with a one year interval. The data were collected during the longitudinal PhD research project of Rob Zwitserlood between 2009 and 2011. The goal of the project was to investigate grammatical growth in children with DLD between the ages of 6 and 10 years. We looked at grammatical complexity, grammatical errors and speech disruptions. The children with DLD were compared on these measures between the three time points, with age matched controls (TD, same age) and with language matched controls (TD, two years younger).

The participating children are:

• 34 children with DLD aged 6 years (measurement once a year at age 6-7-8) = 90 files
• 30 children with DLD aged 8 years (measurement once a year at age 8-9-10) = 90 files
• 30 TD children aged 4 years (measurement once a year at age 4-5-6) = 90 files
• 30 TD children aged 6 years (measurement once a year at age 6-7-8) = 90 files
• 30 TD children aged 8 years (measurement once a year at age 8-9-10) = 90 files

In total, this Dutch corpus of TAK Storytelling tasks contains 462 files (audio + chat). The audio of the children with DLD are of a lower quality. They are digitized from the original cassette tapes using Audacity. The audio from all TD control groups was recoded on a MacBook Pro using Audacity. Silent pauses were measured by hand in the waveform using Audacity.

All parents gave informed consent for re-use of the data scientific research

Acknowledgements

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