CHILDES English Nuffield Corpus

	Danielle Matthews Psychology University of Sheffield danielle.matthews@sheffield.ac.uk website		Michelle McGillion Psychology University of Sheffield m.l.mcgillion@sheffield.ac.uk
	Julian Pine Psychology University of Liverpool julian.pine@liverpool.ac.uk website		Jane Herbert Psychology University of Wollongong herbertj@uow.edu.au website

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Citation information

McGillion, M., Pine, J. M., Herbert, J. S., & Matthews, D. (2017). A randomised controlled trial to test the effect of promoting caregiver contingent talk on language development in infants from diverse socioeconomic status backgrounds. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by the above reference.

Project Description

This corpus represents the child directed speech for 76 infants exposed to British English. These children are a subset of those who took part in a randomised controlled trial to test the effect of promoting caregiver contingent talk on language development (those whose parents gave permission for transcripts to be donated to CHILDES). The transcripts are of free play sessions recorded in the children’s homes when they were 11 months old. For each participant one 10-minute play session (as part of the baseline assessment for the study) was transcribed for child directed speech. Demographic metadata about each participant is provided in the attached The Nuffield Corpus of Infant Directed Speech in Sheffield Metadata.xls file.

In order to take part in the study, all families met the following criteria: infants were 1) first born, singletons; 2) birth weight over 2.5kg, 3) monolingual, raised as English-speaking. Exclusion criteria were 1) infant born more than three weeks premature; 2) primary caregiver worked more than 24 hours per week; 3) infant or primary caregiver had a disability that prevented participation.

Of the 76 primary caregivers in this corpus, one was male. 54 percent of infants were female (n = 41). Infants were 11 months at the home visit (Mean age = 333.76 days; Range: 327 to 344 days). Families lived in areas spanning the full range of the 2015 English Indices of Deprivation (IMD), a measure provided by the UK Office of National Statistics based on neighbourhood employment, income, health provision, and housing. 28% of families lived in areas with a score in the bottom three IMD deciles, a further 35% lived in deciles 4-6, with the remaining 37% living in deciles 7-10.

This study received ethics approval from the Department of Psychology Ethics Sub-Committee at the University of Sheffield. All participating caregivers gave informed consent to participate in the study and for their transcripts to be donated to CHILDES.

Infants and their primary caregiver were video-recorded together in free play for 30 minutes to provide measures of the quantity and quality of caregiver talk and infant vocalisations. 10 minutes of this play session are transcribed here. Once the researcher had set up two cameras to record the interaction, she left the room. The transcripts provided here are of 10 minutes of play that occurred after the infant and parent had had a moment to settle following the researcher’s departure. Parents were asked to play with their child as they normally would, trying to keep them in shot of the cameras if possible.

All transcriptions of caregiver speech were made by a researcher blind to condition and were fully checked by a second researcher (also blind). Video recordings were coded in ELAN (Sloetjes & Wittenburg, 2008). Transcriptions were made following CHAT guidelines (MacWhinney, 2000).

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by British Academy small grant SG101641 and Nuffield Foundation Foundations for Learning grant EDU40447 for the project “Does promoting parents’ contingent talk with their infants benefit language development?”. We thank the families for their participation and Lowri Thomas for assistance with data collection.