new data on the acquisition of Russion

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am happy to announce the inclusion in CHILDES of a new corpus on the
acquisition of Russian.  This is a case study of a child learning Russian in
a monolingual environment in the United States.  It has been contributed by
Eva Bar-Shalom and William Snyder of the University of Connecticut.  It is in
/noneng/russian.sit.   Here is the readme file:

--Brian MacWhinney


The TANJA corpus was videotaped and transcribed by Eva Bar-Shalom
in collaboration with William Snyder.  The project was conducted in the
Child Language Laboratory, Department of Linguistics, University of
Connecticut,
and was funded in part by the University of Connecticut Research Foundation.

The TANJA corpus contains fifteen longitudinal, spontaneous-speech samples
from a monolingual, Russian-learning girl (pseudonym 'Tanja', ages
2;05.14 - 2;11.20) who was recorded in her home in the United States at a
rate of approximately twice per month.  At the time of the study Tanja was
an only child, and was cared for at home by her monolingual (native Russian)
mother and her bilingual (native Russian, ESL) father.  The language spoken
at home was consistently Russian, and exposure to English was minimal.

Tanya was born on 14-DEC-1993.  The dates of the recordings, and Tanja's age
at
each recording, are as follows:

	Tanja01		28-MAY-1996		2;05.14
	Tanja02		10-JUN-1996		2;05.27
	Tanja03		18-JUN-1996		2;06.04
	Tanja04		25-JUN-1996		2;06.11
	Tanja05		23-JUL-1996		2;07.09
	Tanja06		12-AUG-1996		2;07.29
	Tanja07		29-AUG-1996		2;08.15
	Tanja08		09-SEP-1996		2;08.26
	Tanja09		20-SEP-1996		2;09.06
	Tanja10		25-OCT-1996		2;10.11
	Tanja11		08-NOV-1996		2;10.25
	Tanja12		11-NOV-1996		2;10.28
	Tanja13		15-NOV-1996		2;11.01
	Tanja14		22-NOV-1996		2;11.08
	Tanja15		04-DEC-1996		2;11.20

The TANJA corpus has been transcribed by Eva Bar-Shalom, a native
Russian-speaker.  Transcription follows CHAT conventions.  The resulting
transcripts must be considered preliminary, however, because they have not
yet been subjected to rigorous reliability checking.  Additionally, the
system of Romanization employed in the transcripts is not yet entirely
consistent.  We hope to improve on these shortcomings in a future version.

As of June 1999, analyses of Tanja's syntax and morphology appear in two
research reports:

Bar-Shalom, Eva and Snyder, William (1997) "Optional infinitives in
  Russian and their implications for the pro-drop debate."  In Martina
  Lindseth and Steven Franks (eds.) _Formal Approaches to Slavic
  Linguistics: The Indiana Meeting 1996_.  Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic
  Publications, pp.38-47.

Bar-Shalom, Eva and Snyder, William (1998) "Root infinitives in Child
  Russian:  A comparison with Italian and Polish." In Richard Shillcock,
  Antonella Sorace, and Caroline Heycock (eds.) _Language Acquisition:
  Knowledge Representation and Processing.  Proceedings of GALA '97._
  Edinburgh, UK: The University of Edinburgh.

The TANJA corpus is being made available to the larger research community
in its current form, with acknowledgement that errors and inconsistencies
in typography, Romanization, and possibly transcription may still be present.


Comments and questions on the TANJA corpus should be directed to:

	barshalo at uconnvm.uconn.edu	OR	wsnyder at sp.uconn.edu

	Prof. Eva Bar-Shalom, Ph.D.		Prof. William Snyder, Ph.D.
	Dept. of Linguistics, U-1145		Dept. of Linguistics, U-1145
  	University of Connecticut		University of Connecticut
	341 Mansfield Road			341 Mansfield Road
	Storrs, CT 06269-1145			Storrs, CT 06269-1145
	USA					USA

Papers making use of the corpus should cite (Bar-Shalom & Snyder 1997, 1998).