CHILDES Turkish Aksu Koç Corpus

Ayhan Aksu Koç
Department of Psychology
Bogazici University
koc@boun.edu.tr

Participants:	33
Type of Study:	naturalistic
Location:	Turkey
Media type:	no longer available
DOI:	doi:10.21415/T5SP6C

Citation information

Slobin, D. (1982). Universal and particular in the acquisition of language. In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: The state of the art, 128-172. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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

These data were gathered in 1972 and 1973 in Istanbul, under the direction of Dan I. Slobin, with support from The Grant Foundation. All of the children came from urban, professional families in which at least one parent had a college education. They were selected at 4-month age intervals, from 2;0 to 4;4. Some of the children were visited a second time, 4 months later, resulting in a full age range of 2;0 to 4;8. The first visit occurred within 1 week on either side of the day of the month corresponding to the child’s birthday. Children were visited in their homes or preschools over the period of a week, during which they were given a battery of cognitive and language tasks, as described in Slobin (1982). The overall study included Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, Italian, and English. The Turkish phase of the study was designed in collaboration with Ayhan Aksu-Koç.

These transcripts represent all of the adult–child spontaneous and guided conversation during the course of those visits. (A number of standardized comprehension questions are interspersed in the conversations.) The interviewer was female (either Ayla Algar or Alev Alatli’); as indicated at the top of each sample, other adults and children took part in some sessions. All words are in lower case; only proper names are capitalized. Uncertain transcriptions are enclosed in parentheses; standard equivalents of child or colloquial forms are given in square brackets. Child utterances are separated into morphemes by hyphens. Diacritics are marked by the apostrophe which indicates umlaut following o and u, dot following I, dotless following i, macron following g, and cedilla following c and s.

Acknowledgements

These data were entered onto computer and coded with support from the National Science Foundation (BNS-8812854), using facilities provided by the Institute of Cognitive Studies and the Institute of Human Development of the University of California at Berkeley. The transcripts were typed and morphemicized by Abdul Bolat and Mine Ternar; they were checked and grammatically coded by Aylin Ku’ntay. Further information can be obtained from Dan I. Slobin.