CHILDES English Gathercole/Burns Corpus

Virginia C. Gathercole Linguistics Florida International University walesgin@gmail.com website

Rebecca Burns Childhood Education University of South Florida, Sarasota burnsmr@sar.usf.edu website

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Citation information

Gathercole, V. (1986). The acquisition of the present perfect: explaining differences in the speech of Scottish and American children. Journal of Child Language, 13, 537–560.

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

Cross-sectional data were collected from 12 Scottish children aged 3:0 to 6;4 at the Nursery of the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. There are four children at each of three age levels: 3-year-olds (mean age 3;2.15), 4-year-olds (mean age: 4;2), 5-year-olds (mean age: 5;0). Four Scottish adults interacted with the children: two of the children’s teachers, one sevitor of the nursery, and one mother of one of the children. The first three had educations through secondary school; the last had attended college. Each group of four Scottish children was videotaped in 8 half-hour sessions for a total of 24 sessions. Each adult participated in two sessions with each group. The structured sessions involved block tasks and art tasks. All utterances were transcribed from the videotapes, along with extensive information on the nonlinguistic contexts of the utterances. The data were reformatted into CHAT by Rebecca Burns.