Koin é corpus

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,

     I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of the Koiné  
corpus of transcripts from 70 preschoolers aged 18-53 months in  
Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain.  Many of the children use  
only Castillian, but a few use predominantly Galician and others use  
Galician on occasion.  The corpus has been collected by Prof.  
Milagros Fernández Pérez and her team and is now available in the / 
Romance/Spanish section of the CHILDES database.  Many thanks to  
Milagros and her team for this contribution.  Appended is a further  
passage from the documentation for the corpus.

--Brian MacWhinney

   This corpus is useful because of its large size, and also because  
of a) the balance between contributions by boys (34) and girls (37);  
b) an unusually high sampling frequency maintained throughout an age- 
span to which relatively little attention has been paid; and c) the  
variety of social backgrounds of the informants. It will a)  
constitute a valuable source of data on the acquisition of Castilian  
(and to a lesser extent Galician) during a critical but little- 
studied age-span; b) allow the inference of acquisition patterns in  
regard to all aspects of language (phonetics, grammar, pragmatics,  
etc.); and possibly c) allow the establishment of developmental  
profiles for evaluation of individual children.