CHILDES Portuguese AlegreX (Cross-sectional) Corpus
Ana Maria Guimarães
anaguima@vortex.ufrgs.br
website
|
| Participants: | 100 |
| Type of Study: | naturalistic |
| Location: | Brazil |
| Media type: | no longer available |
| DOI: | doi:10.21415/T5FW2T |
Guimarães, A. M. (1994). Desenvolvimento da linguagem da criança na
fase deletramento. Cadernos de Estudos Linguísticos, 26, 103–110.
Guimarães, A. M. (1995). The use of the CHILDES database for
Brazilian Portuguese. In I. H. Faria & M. J. Freitas (Eds.), Studies
on the acquisition of Portuguese. Lisbon: Colibri.
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
Since 1991, a group of Brazilian researchers in Porto Alegre has been
working to establish a database on the language development of children
from 5 to 9 years of age. This research focuses on language development
in the period of the acquisition of literacy. The project is named
“Language development in children during the literacy period.” The main
goal of this project is to establish a data archive for doctoral
students. The data are collected both cross-sectionally and
longitudinally.There are 180 cross-sectional participants, divided into
8 groups with 20 participants in each, sampled at 6-month intervals.
There are 6 participants in the longitudinal study who have been
followed five times a year, since 1992. All of the participants are
middle-class students from private schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is located
on the left bank of the Guaibaís river. With a territory of 497 square
kilometers and nearly 3 million inhabitants, the metropolitan area has
an intense cultural life built around two universities, museums and
several theaters.
The longitudinal data are in the directory “AlegreLong”. The
cross-sectional data are in the directory “AlegreX”. The age ranges of
the 8 AlegreX cross-sectional groups are:
- 5a 5;0 to 5;5,29
- 5b 5;6 to 5;11,29
- 6a 6;0 to 6;5,29
- 6b 6;6 to 6;11,29
- 7a 7;0 to 7;5,29
- 7b 7;6 to 7;11,29
- 8a 8;0 to 8;5,29
- 8b 8;6 to 9;0
The seven children in the AlegreLong longitudinal corpus are given in
the following table. The data from CAM are not yet included in the
database.
| Child | Gender | Age
| | ALE | female | 4;8.7 to 8;10.11
|
| CAM | female | 4;11.14 to 8;9.17
|
| CAR | female | 4;3:7 to 8;5.1
|
| GAB | male | 5;9.19 to 9;0.17
|
| MAT | male | 6;2.3 to 9;0.2
|
| NAT | female | 5;4.2 to 8.9.24
|
| ROD | male | 5;5.1 to 7;7.2
|
All data were collected in interview situation between a female adult
and the child. All interviews took place in the school the child was
attending or in the home, and lasted approximately 30 minutes. There
were three elicitation tasks that were designed to provide a
representative sampling of the child’s linguistic capabilities:
- Dialogue between the investigator and the children during which the experimenter asks questions about school, home, or significant events in the child’s life (like his or her birthday).
- Personal narrative (oral and written) in which the aim was to encourage the child to report on a meaningful event, at school or at home.
- Narrative from sequential pictures.
- For 20% of the participants there are also data from two additional tasks:
- Free conversation between children (dyads), and
- Retelling of a story the child had listened to before.
There are two master’s dissertations in progress based on this data. One
of them looks for the emergence of narrative voices and the other
analyses the use of aspect to distinguish narrative foreground and
background. We are also developing a new project on spatial expression
in children’s narratives, in collaboration with Drs. Faria and Batoréo
of the University of Lisbon in Portugal.