New French and English Comparable Corpora

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
    I am happy to announce the addition to CHILDES of two new corpora  
designed to provide a direct comparison between French and English,  
while also providing excellent material for the study of the learning  
of each language separately.  The two corpora each include six  
children (3 male, 3 female) studied intensively between the ages of  
one and three.  The English data are from Katherine Demuth's group at  
Brown University in Providence RI and the French data are from  
Harriet Jisa's group at the University of Lyon 2.  The files are all  
linked to video and the video for 10 of the children is available  
from the web.  For easier web playback, we will eventually extract  
MP3 and Wave files from the video.   A few of the segments of the  
French data are not yet in place, but will be configured shortly.   
All of the data are also transcribed throughout in IPA on the %pho  
line, making this now the largest database available for the study of  
child phonology.
    The English corpus can be found under /Eng-USA/Providence and the  
French corpus can be found under /Romance/French/Lyon.  Fuller  
documentation can be found in the database manuals.
    Many thanks to Katherine, Harriet, and their coworkers for this  
enormously impressive contribution.  I believe this corpus will have  
a major impact on a wide variety of issues in the study of language  
development.

--Brian MacWhinney