Arabic, Turkish, Dutch bilingual narratives

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a major new corpus on
narratives from bilingual children and their comparison control groups.  The
data come from Petra Bos and Jeroen Aarssen of Tilburg University.  They are
to be found in the aarssen/bos.sit and aarssen/bos.zip files in the /biling
directory.  I am not including them in the narrative directory, although they
are clearly relevant to the study of narratives.  Also, people may wish to
note that these are the first data we have from Arabic speaking children.
The corpus is quite large with a total of over 1000 narratives.  Following is
the beginning of the readme file.

--Brian MacWhinney

   This database contains 1021 transcripts collected in the Netherlands,
Turkey and Morocco by Jeroen Aarssen and Petra Bos, Tilburg University.
Bilingual data (either Turkish-Dutch or Moroccan Arabic-Dutch) were collected
within the framework of a longitudinal study into development of bilingualism
among Turkish and Moroccan children in The Netherlands.
The age range of the bilingual informants is from 4 to 10. The design of the
study is pseudo-longitudinal, i.e. two consecutive cohorts of 25 informants
were followed during a longer period of time: the younger cohort in four
rounds (from age 4 to age 7) and the older cohort in three rounds (from 8 to
10). The first round of data collection took place in 1991, and data
collection was repeated in 1992, 1993 and 1994. The interval between
subsequent rounds of data collection was about one year.
Turkish, Moroccan Arabic and Dutch monolingual control data were collected as
well in, respectively, Turkey, Morocco and The Netherlands. The Dutch control
data were collected according to the same pseudo-longitudinal design as
described above. The Turkish and Moroccan control data, however, were
collected cross-sectionally from three different age groups (age 5, 7 and 9).
Each transcript contains retellings of six short six-picture stories and the
frog story (Mayer, 1969). The six short stories were constructed according to
the following set-up: two stories with a clearly identifiable main character;
two with two equivalent main characters; and two without a clearly
identifiable main character.

This research was supported by the Linguistic Research Foundation (Grant No.
300-172-002), which is funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific
Research, NWO. This research resulted into the two PhD. theses cited below
(Aarssen, 1996 and Bos, 1997).

Publications using these data should cite:

Aarssen, J. (1996). Relating events in two languages: Acquisition of cohesive
devices by Turkish-Dutch bilingual children at school age. Studies in
Multilingualism, Vol. 2. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press.
Bos, P. (1997) Development of bilingualism: A study of school-age Moroccan
children in the Netherlands. Studies in Multilingualism, Vol. 8. Tilburg:
Tilburg University Press.

Jeroen Aarssen
Petra Bos

Tilburg University - BABYLON,
Center for Studies on Multilingualism in the Multicultural Society
P.O. Box 90153
5000 LE  Tilburg
The Netherlands

e-mail: J.Aarssen at kub.nl, P.H.F.Bos at kub.nl