CHILDES Quechua Gelman Corpus

Susan Gelman Psychology University of Michigan gelman@umich.edu website

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Citation information

Gelman, S. A., Mannheim, B., Escalante, C., & Tapia, I. S. (2015). Teleological talk in parent–child conversations in Quechua. First Language, 35(4-5), 359-376. pdf

Users of these data should give the above article.

Southern Peruvian Quechua Parent-Child Task

Language: Southern Peruvian Quechua, an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes (Mannheim, 1991), is a member of the ‘Quechua’ linguistic family. ‘Southern Peruvian Quechua’ is part of a linguistic continuum that includes the Bolivian and Argentine varieties of Quechua and those varieties spoken in the six southeastern departments of Peru (i.e., Quechua sureño; Cerrón-Palomino, 1987; Mannheim, 1991).

Participants: The present dataset includes 38 parent-child dyads (of which 36 were reported in the 2015 paper). The participants we include here are: 1 two-year-old [not in 2015 paper; out of age range], 9 three-year-olds, 10 four-year-olds, 17 five-year-olds, and 1 six-year-old [not in 2015 paper; out of age range], and their parents (37 mothers, 1 father). In most cases we did not have children’s birthdates; therefore, mean ages are not provided. This is a limitation in conducting field research; given potential errors in parental reporting, these reported ages should be interpreted with caution. An additional seven dyads were recorded but their data not used, due to poor transcriptions (n = 5), a nonverbal child (n = 1), and a child who was a sibling of another participant (n = 1). This dataset includes three of the dropped dyads, the two outside of age range and the nonverbal child.

Task: Parents and children were recorded interacting with one another at home, outdoors, in Peru. In each interaction, participants looked through a wordless researcher-created picture book depicting a variety of familiar objects across multiple content domains (people, animals, plants, artifacts).

A scanned copy of the book can be found as a separate file titled Picture Book and a descriptor for each page can be found as a separate file entitled Book Descriptions. Please note that the original book was higher quality than this scan.

Community: The community is located in the central Andes, in a mountainous region within 47.5 kilometers of Cuzco, the former Inka capital. The community is located about 3000 meters above mean sea level, and includes access to high valley lands producing maize and grains as well as to puna grasslands used primarily for grazing camelids. While the agricultural, valley settlements in the community are nucleated, the herding settlements are dispersed, with small clusters of one to three houses surrounded by pasture land, but still within an easy walk of each other. Children in these households have few if any books at home, little access to movies or TV (indeed TV programs are in Spanish, and so generally unintelligible to children), and no computers (at home or in the schools). Most parents receive at most a 5th-grade education.

Notes: When there was an action (&=laughs) that was not accompanied by speech, the action is written as a comment. Additionally, the original study was conducted in Quechua, the English translation is below the Quechua speech.