CHILDES Dutch Wijnen Corpus

Frank Wijnen Department of Linguistics University of Utrecht f.n.k.wijnen@uu.nl website

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Project Description

Niek was a slow starter in language, both with respect to grammar and to phonology. The first sample in the corpus, at age 2;7, yields an MLU (in words) of 1.72. Some details of Niek’s grammatical development are given in Wijnen and Elbers (1993). Further information is available on request. Niek’s phonological development was also slow. Particularly, he persisted in various substitution processes, most notably “fronting,” that is, substituting alveolar consonants for back obstruents and clusters. This behavior gradually disappeared during the period of observation. At approximately age 4;6, he had developed into a fluent and competent speaker, intelligible for adults other than his parents.

The recordings were generally made in unstructured settings. Usually, the target child and an adult interlocutor (mostly the father) were engaged in some normal everyday routine: playing (often with Legos), looking through picture books, and so forth.

Some 31 hours of recordings were collected. A subset of these, amounting to 23 hours, were transcribed. The presence of participants other than one of the parents, as well as other salient or exceptional characteristics of the tapings are mentioned in the “Remarks” column. Additional aspects of the coding and transcription techniques can be found in the description of the Utrecht corpus.

The data files are labeled in accordance with the participant’s age at the date of recording. For instance, “nie31017.cha” represents the recording made at age 3;10.17.