CHILDES Greek Doukas Corpus

Thomas Doukas Linguistics Unlimited thomas.doukas@aol.co.uk

Browsable transcripts

Download transcripts

Link to media folder

Citation information

Doukas, T. & Marinis, T. (2012). "The acquisition of person and number morphology within the verbal domain in early Greek". University of Reading Language Studies Working Papers, Volume 4 (2012)

Doukas, T. (2011). The Acquisition of the verbal domain in child Greek. Evidence from a new child Greek Corpus. Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, University of Reading.

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 includes data from two girls learning Greek - Eve and Maria. Maria was born 26-OCT-1995 and Eve was born 06-AUG-2002. Maria’s data (Doukas, 1998) were collected in the following way: Maria was tape-recorded in her home starting from the age of 2;0.24 until the age of 2;8.27 for a total of eight sessions, once a month for 30 to 45 minutes. The recordings were made mostly in the investigator's presence. When this was not possible, they were made in the presence of well instructed relatives. Finally, the recordings were made under circumstances of playing or reading fairy tales. All songs occurring in the data have not been analysed, because they are considered to consist of memorised or repeated expressions. On the other hand total or partial imitations of phrases produced by the adults were included in the analyses.

Eve’s data has been collected in a similar way to Maria’s data during the period 2004/2005. Eve is also Greek speaking, based in Athens, Greece. Eve was tape-recorded starting from the age of 1;7.15 until the age of 2;11.11 for a total of 16 tape-recordings, with variable intervals (approximately monthly) of variable duration between 30 and 45 minutes, mostly about 7PM. Eve’s recordings have been rearranged into 13 files with some recordings merged when the age of recording was too close.

Eve’s recordings started at an earlier age in comparison to Maria. From the analyses of Maria’s speech it appears that Maria was in a more advanced developmental stage from the onset of the collection i.e. age 2;0. Therefore it was decided to place the onset of the data collection of Eve earlier at the age of 1;7 hoping to be able to capture and observe the earlier stage of development of grammatical phenomena and as a result the developmental transitions of her speech production. This also conforms with Stephany’s corpus (available from the CHILDES) where the lower age bound is 1;9. Many of the transcripts were checked by and discussed with Theo Marinis and other native speakers of MG.

The %xmor tier contains extensive morphological coding that was done by hand, and the %err tier contains error coding. Details about the codes used in these two lines can be found in the thesis.