CHILDES Italian D’Odorico Corpus

Laura D’Odorico (1948-2014) Dipartimento di Psicologia Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Mirco Fasolo Dipartimento di Neuroscienze, Imaging e Scienze Cliniche Università "G. d'Annunzio" di Chieti-Pescara mirco.fasolo@unimib.it website

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Citation information

• D’Odorico, L., Carubbi, S. (2003). Prosodic characteristics of early multi-word utterances in Italian Children. First Language, 23(1), 97-116.
• D’Odorico, L., Carubbi, S., Salerni, N., Calvo, V. (2001). Vocabulary development in Italian children: a longitudinal evaluation of quantitative and qualitative aspects. Journal of Child Language, 28(2), 351-372.
• Salerni, N., Assanelli, A., D'Odorico, L., Rossi, G. (2007). Qualitative aspects of productive vocabulary at the 200- and 500-word stages: a comparison between spontaneous speech and parental report data. First Language, 27, 75-87.

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 data presented here regards 6 Italian children who participated, with their mother, in a longitudinal study on language development. In particular, dyads were video recorded during play sessions when children had a vocabulary size of about 100 (mean vocabulary size = 101; mean age = 1;07.08), 200 (mean vocabulary size = 216; mean age = 1;08.05), and 500 word (mean vocabulary size = 534; mean age = 2;01.04).

The children’s vocabulary development was assessed through the mothers’ input on the Italian version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (Primo Vocabolario del Bambino - PVB; Caselli & Casadio, 1995), from the children were 16 months old until they reached a vocabulary of about 500 words. When children reached the fixed vocabulary size, mother and child were invited to participate to a video recorded unstructured 30-minute play session (two children exceeded largely the first fixed vocabulary size, so they don’t participated at the first video recorded play session). Five different sets of toys were used during the session, in order to provide a large vocabulary sample: a farm, a “nurturing” set (telephone, a doll with bed, mattress and pillow), a “food” set (plastic fruits and vegetables with dishes and piece of cutleries), some illustrated books and some figures. Mothers were instructed to play normally with the children, trying to attract the child’s attention on each set of toys. Experimenter assisted to play-session and could participate to interaction if directly involved by children or mother. In a second phase, an observer transcribed mother’s and infant’s utterances using CHAT format.

The head of the project was Laura D’Odorico; associate researchers were Nicoletta Salerni, Alessandra Assanelli, and Mirco Fasolo.

			First sampling-point		Second sampling-point		Third sampling-point
	S	Order	Age	Voc. size	< i>Age	Voc. size	Age	Voc. size
Claudia	f	2	1;11.08	108	2;00.10	195	2;06.05	421
Davide	m	1			1;06.16	233	2;00.02	648
Federica	f	1	1;05.20	97	1;07.04	211	2;00.04	614
Linda	f	2	1;04.03	91	1;08.16	251	2; 00.02	541
Lorenzo	m	1			1;08.00	205	2;00.05	540
Veronica	f	1	1;07.10	109	1;08.12	199	2;00.08	441

Acknowledgements

The project has been partially supported by a grant from Italian Government (PRIN 2004 N° 200419307).