French-English bilingual study

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am happy to announce the addition of a new corpus of French-English
bilingual data from Charles Watkins of the University of Paris XIII.  The
data are to be found in /bilingual/watkins.sit.  The study focused on the
acquisition of deictic terms, as the following documentation indicates.

--Brian MacWhinney

    This corpus was collated and scripted for a doctoral thesis in English
Linguistics at the Université de Paris XIII entitled ³The Acquisition of
deixis in English by children brought up in a bilingual environment². The
focus of the reasearch is theoretical linguistics rather than
psycholinguistics.
    The corpus is made up of scripted conversations in a naturalistic setting
(often family videos not initially intended for research purposes) involving
7 subjects from three families over a range of ages between 1;9 to 7;2. The
subjects are all simultaneously bilingual, being exposed to both French and
English in the home setting from birth.
    The corpus contains some 1400 child utterances in 72 CHAT files, each
file corresponding to an uninterrupted sequence of dialogue. The transcript
contains coding tags on the main line, coding tiers and GEM markers for the
purposes of the research project. All deictics are flagged on the main line
with @ed (English deictic), @frd (French deictic) or @fred (Franco-English
deictic) postcodes according to the phonetic form of the deictic. Two coding
tiers, %dei (DEIctic) and %ana (pragmatic ANAlysis) further develop the
analysis. The %ana line is not language specific, and simply codes whether
the deictic is used deictically (either symbolically or gesturally) or
non-deictically (anaphorically or non-anaphorically). The %dei tier has the
codes described in the following table which gives the codes for English. A
parallel set of codes was also used for French