CHILDES English Sekali Corpus

Martine Sekali Département Études Anglophones Université Paris Nanterre sekali@parisnanterre.fr website

Browsable transcripts

Download transcripts

Link to media folder

Citation information

Morgenstern, A., Blondel, M., Beaupoil-Hourdel, P., Benazzo, S., Boutet, D., Kochan, A., Limousin, F. (2018). The blossoming of negation in gesture, sign and oral productions. In M. Hickman, E. Veneziano, & H. Jisa (Eds.), Sources of Variation in First Language Acquisition: Languages, contexts, and learners (pp. 339–364).

Beaupoil-Hourdel, Pauline (2015). Multimodal acquisition and expression of negation. Analysis of a videotaped and longitudinal corpus of a French and an English mother-child dyad. (Ph.D. Dissertation). Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris.

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 Ellie and Stephen data was collected by Martine Sekali while doing linguistic research within the framework of the ANR COLAJE project financed but the French National Agency for Research (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) from 2009 to 2012 (ANR-08-COM-O21). Ellie and then her little brother Stephen were recruited in order to add British English longitudinal data for the analysis of preschool grammatical development of English as a first language. They were filmed an hour every month mostly by their grand-mother (Bernadette) in naturalistic context during spontaneous interaction with their parents.

The two children live in Warwickshire (England), their mother is a research technician in biotechnology, and their father is an electronic engineer. On the mother’s side, the grandmother is a special needs teacher and the grandfather an electrical engineer. Ellie and Stephen are two typically developing children with rather fast linguistic development.

Ellie was born on March 6th, 2009 and was an only child at the beginning of the data. She was filmed from the age of 9 months to the age of 5 (43 sessions).

Stephen (Ellie’s brother) was born on October 18th, 2013, and was filmed from the age of 10 months and 27 days to the age of 4 years and 2 months (33 sessions) The family in England were given a camera by the CoLAJE project and tapes were sent and then collected from England by Martine Sekali, Christophe Parisse took care of all the technical aspects and put them on line on the Ortolang database.

Many thanks to the children’s family, and particularly to Bernadette, David, Catherine, Martin and Véronique for their contribution to the child language database for research. This corpus is also available from Ortolang, supervised by Christophe Parisse.

Currently (March 2021) the corpus is almost totally untranscribed. We welcome contributions from people interested in transcribing sessions.