new corpus on bilingualism

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am happy to announce the contribution to CHILDES of a new corpus on
French-English bilingualism from Fred Genesee at McGill.  The data are in
genesee.sit in the /biling directory on childes.psy.cmu.edu.  The readme for
this corpus follows.

--Brian MacWhinney



Linguistic community: The children and their families all lived in Montreal
or surrounding communities. Metropolitan Montreal includes a population of
approximately 2.5 million people. It is a bilingual community in which many
individuals are bilingual in French and English and use both languages on a
daily basis. Moreover, evidence of French and English are evident in the
media (there are French and English TV stations, newspapers, magazines,
etc), on the street (in the form of signs and announcements), and in stores
(most store personnel in medium to large stores can provide service in
English and French).  It is common to hear English and French being spoken
by people on the street, in buses, stores, etc.

 
Context of Data Collection: The children were being raised in homes where
both languages were used on a regular basis, usually each language was
spoken predominantly by one parent and the other language by the other
parent. The children and their parents were recorded in the children's homes
-- often in the living room, playroom, or kitchen. The recordings were done
by an assistant or graduate student who was otherwise uninvolved in the
interactions. The parents were asked to interact and talk with their
children as they normally would using whichever language(s) they would
normally use and to ignore the assistant as much as possible.

 
Funding Agency: The research based on these data was funded by the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Ottawa, Canada, to Fred Genesee.



Data Transcription:

Twenty to thirty minutes of each session with each child were transcribed
using the CHAT transcription system.  Transcription began after the first
five minutes of the session, in order to allow the children to become
comfortable with the taping equipment.  In cases where the children had
produced less than 100 intelligible utterances in the initial 20 minutes of
data, transcription continued until at least 100 intelligible utterances had
been recorded. Each utterance was coded according to addressee (parent,
other -- e.g., toy dog) and the language of the utterance (French only,
English only, mixed, neutral, unintelligible. Mixed utterances consisted of
utterances that contained both English and French -- for example, the
utterance, ³ça go pas lಠ(that doesn¹t go there) was considered an instance
of intra-utterance mixing. A neutral utterance was one which could belong to
either language, such as proper names, ³ah² and ³oh².  Animal sounds that
are similar in English and French (i.e. ³meow²) and the word ³okay² were
also coded as neutral, as it is impossible to determine the language in
which these words were being produced. However, when a neutral word appeared
in an utterance of only one language, the entire utterance was coded as
being in that language.  For instance, the utterance ³oh a truck² would be
coded as English, whereas the sentence ³oh un camion² would be coded as
French.  Finally, utterances which were incomprehensible were classified as
unintelligible; these were sometimes transcribed phonetically but no
orthographic transcription was possible, and they were often dropped from
further analyses.  

            All transcripts were reviewed by one of two bilingual assistants
who was a native speaker of the primary language of the session.  Any
discrepancies were resolved by discussion.

 

            More detailed coding and analyses were undertaken in accordance
with the specific objectives of the research. The following is a list of
research that is based in part of in whole on these transcriptions. The
following publications were based, in part, on these transcripts:

 

Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation
in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language 22, 611-631.

 

Genesee, F., Boivin, I., & Nicoladis, E. (1996).  Talking with strangers:  A
study of bilingual children's communicative competence. Applied
Psycholinguistics, 17, 427-442.

 

 

Nicoladis, E., & Genesee, F. (1998). Parental discourse and codemixing in
bilingual children. International Journal of Bilingualism 2, 85-99.

 

Paradis, J., Nicoladis, E., & Genesee, F. (2000).  Early emergence of
structural constraints on code-mixing: evidence from French-English
bilingual children. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 3, 245-261.