CHILDES Russian Protassova Corpus

Ekaterina Protassova Modern Languages University of Helsinki ekaterina.protassova@helsinki.fi website

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Project Description

Ekaterina Protassova of the University of Helsinki has contributed data from recordings of her daughter Varvara, born on October 1, 1982, in Moscow, the first and the only child in the family. Her father Alexander (Sasha) was a book illustrator and her mother Ekaterina (Katja) was a psycholinguist. The child was brought up at home. Some days of the week grandparents took care of her, sometimes she spent several hours in a family with two children and a dog. Her grandparents lived at the time in the same flat; both were scientists. The girl’s name is Varvara, which is a Russian equivalent for Barbara. A more common short variant is Varja; diminutives include Varen’ka, Varjusha, Varjunja, and Varjushen’ka. The appellative is Var’, Varjun’, and Varjush. At seven months, Varvara used her first word which was to call herself Ain’ka, so sometimes this name is used by parents.

All of the recordings were taken during 90-minute periods in the usual situations at home or in the summer house by a simple recorder and written down immediately after-wards in Russian. The Roman transliteration, English translation, and comments were added in 1995. Childish sound modifications and shortenings of the conventional words are usually included, at least until the fourth session. The dates of the files are as follows:

File	Age	File	Age
1	1;6.5	4	1;10.14
2	1;7.13	5	2;0.1
3a	1;8.24	6	2;4.14
3b	1;8.24	7	2;10.14