CHILDES English Soderstrom Corpus


Melanie Soderstrom
Department of Psychology
University of Manitoba

website

Participants: 54
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: USA
Media type: audio
DOI: doi:10.21415/T5J595

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Citation information

Dr. Soderstrom requests that she be sent a copy of any peer-reviewed publications involving analyses of this database.

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 corpus was collected to examine the properties of speech input available to preverbal infants relevant to the acquisition of the grammar, and to evaluate the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis for preverbal infants.

The participants were two mothers, each with young boy babies. The mothers and their babies were visited at (semi)-regular intervals from 6-10 months (14 hours and 8.5 hours), along with two one-hour recordings each at 12 months. Transcripts or analyses of two follow-up recordings made of each mother at 18 months (with video), may be made available to individuals upon request to the above address. Additional information regarding the two families is available in the JCL citation below.

The mothers very kindly agreed to donate their recordings to CHILDES and to have the first names of the immediate family members available in CHILDES in order to facilitate analyses. Please treat this information with respect and help to preserve their anonymity otherwise. Last and middle names and some other possibly identifying information have been removed from the transcript and recordings.

Charles was born 24-FEB-2003 and his brother on 29-AUG-1998. Joseph was born 19-DEC-2002. His sister was born 17-MAR-2000 and his brother on 07-APR-1998.

The audio recordings were collected by the mothers in the home. Recordings obtained within a short period of time are combined into the same transcript file. Transcription uses basic CHAT format with no phonetic detail. Please note that while care was taken in transcribing speech errors, noisy environments, and other difficult sections, the transcripts should not be considered error-free. Users should examine the transcripts and/or recordings carefully given their particular research needs. Additional information regarding the transcription process is available in the above JCL reference or by contacting Melanie Soderstrom at the above address. Please advise Melanie Soderstrom if you detect any obvious discrepancies between the recordings and the written form.

Acknowledgements

The collection of this corpus was funded by a Kirschstein NRSA postdoctoral research fellowship 5F32HD042927 to MS and an NIH grant 1RO1HD32005 to JLM.