audio samples of 12-to-24-month-olds

[Karla Gilbride]

Hello,

My name is Karla Gilbride, and I am a senior at Swarthmore college cuently
working on an undergraduate thesis in linguistics. I am investigating the
possible facilitative effects of Motherese prosody on lexical acquisition
and the development of pragmatic competence, and I was hoping to supplement
my literature review with an analysis of some audio samples featuring
spontaneous interactions between English-speaking parents and their infants
at 12 through 24 months of age. What I was hoping to do was compare the
prosodic characteristics of the parent's speech over several samples taken
at different child ages and then look for any correlations between the types
of prosodic characteristics used and the amount of lexical acquisition,
(particularly of focally stressed words), and pragmatic competence, (e.g.,
percentage of parental utterances followed by topically appropriate
responses or expansions), shown by the child as he/she gets older. In order
to have some basis for comparison, I was hoping to look at at least two
parent-child dyads. I have some software, called PROT, which is supposed to
do pitch tracking and other types of analyses on digitzed sound files, but
unfortunately I haven't had a chance to use it yet because I haven't been
able to find any files in the audio corpora in the CHILDES database
involving children at the ages I am interested in studying.

Does anyone on this list have ideas of where I could find sound files of
English-speaking parents interacting with their 12-to-24-month-old children,
particularly any longitudinal samples that you know of that include multiple
recordings of the same child at different ages? Any suggestions you might
have would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help,
Karla Gilbride


Karla Gilbride
Swarthmore College
500 College Ave.
Swarthmore, PA 19081
(610) 690-3877
kgilbri1 at swarthmore.edu

"All the Declaration of Independence guarantees is the pursuit of happiness.
You have to catch up with it on your own."--Benjamin Franklin


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