major new English corpus

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am also happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of a very large new
corpus of data on the acquisition of British English from Elena Lieven, Anna
Theakston, Julian Pine, and Carolyn Reid, whose addresses are listed below.
This large corpus includes a complete disambiguated %mor tier which should
make it extremely interesting and useful for grammatical studies.  Here is
the beginning of the readme file for the corpus.

--Brian MacWhinney

This corpus consists of transcripts of audio-recordings from a longitudinal
study of twelve English-speaking children between the ages of approximately
2-3 years.  The children were recruited through newspaper advertisements and
local nurseries.  All the children were first borns, monolingual and were
cared for primarily by their mothers.  Although socioeconomic status was not
taken into account with respect to recruitment, the children were from
predominantly middle-class.  There were six boys and six girls, half from
Manchester and half from Nottingham.  At the beginning of the study, the
children ranged in age from 1;8.22 to 2;0.25 with MLUs ranging between 1.06
to 2.27 in morphemes.  The children¹s dates of birth and ages are available
in the headers to each transcript.  The transcripts for each child are
numbered from 1 to 34 corresponding to the tape number and labelled (a) and
(b) to correspond to the two 30 minute sessions within each recording. The
following recording sessions were missed and therefore have no corresponding
transcript: Aran14a/b: Carl14b,24a/b: John15a/b,16a/b: Ruth4a/b: Warren3b.

Contributors:

Elena V. M. Lieven
Max Planck Institute for
Evolutionary Anthropology
Inselstrasses 22
D-04103 Leipzig Germany
lieven at eva.mpg.de

Julian Pine
Department of Psychology
University of Nottingham
NE7 2RCD Nottingham, UK
jp at psych.nott.ac.uk

Caroline Rowland
Institute of Behavioural Sciences
Mickleover Site
University of Derby
DE3 5GX Derby, UK
c.rowland at derby.ac.uk

Anna Theakston
Department of Psychology
University of Manchester
Oxford Rd
M13 9PL Manchester, UK
theaksto at fs4.psy.man.ac.uk

Publications that make use of this corpus should cite:

Theakston, A. L., Lieven, E. V. M., Pine, J. M. & Rowland, C. F. (in press).
The role of performance limitations in the acquisition of 'mixed'
verb-argument structure at stage 1.  To appear in M. Perkins & S. Howard
(Eds.) New Directions in Language Development and Disorders. Plenum.