new Hungarian-English corpus
Brian MacWhinney
macw at cmu.edu
Fri Jun 23 20:16:44 UTC 2000
Dear Info-CHILDES,
I am happy to announce the addition of the first CHILDES corpus on
trilingual language acquisition. It is from Judit Navracsics at Veszprém and
Pécs. Judit's documentation file follows. The corpus is navracsics.zip and
navracsics. It is in the /biling directory, although three languages are
involved.
--Brian MacWhinney
*******************
This directory contains a longitudinal corpus of a pair of siblings acquiring
English and Persian as their first two languages from birth and Hungarian as
an early second language. In the focus is the children's Hungarian
development. The corpus was contributed by Judit Navracsics, University of
Veszprém, Hungary. The data are in CHAT format.
The subjects of this study are a pair of siblings, named Nasim (a girl) and
Nabil (a boy), who were exposed to English and Persian from birth. Until the
age of three and two, respectively, the children lived with their parents in
Canada. Then, in 1994 the family moved to Hungary. The parents started
teaching at the University of Veszprém, and the children started attending a
Hungarian monolingual nursery school, where their Hungarian early second
language acquisition started. The parents addressed the children in English
as a rule, though, when the mother was alone with them, she used Persian. In
Hungarian communities the children used only Hungarian, never brought their
other two languages in any kind of speech activities. Their Hungarian
development was very rapid and resembled that of Hungarian monolingual
children. After 1;6 years Hungarian became the dominant language for the
children, they used it between, themselves when playing alone. Code-switching
happened only when either of the parents appeared in the room. During the two
years of observation the children stayed in Hungary and were addressed in
English apart from their parents only by some visiting relatives
occasionally, and some friends in Hungary.
In total, 30 hours of recordings were made: 8 hours of video and 22 hours of
audio. Data collection was carried out first in the children's home while the
children were playing with the investigator. The investigator used her native
Hungarian with the children, only at the very beginning of the observation
(i.e. two months after their arrival in Hungary) occurred code-switching to
English. However, the investigator used English with the parents in the
presence of the children. The recordings took place at two week intervals in
the first year. After one year the family moved to another Hungarian town.
Since then students of the University of Veszprém traveled to visit the
family at three months intervals to collect data. The students also followed
the communication pattern mentioned above, i.e. they used English with the
parents and Hungarian with the children. There are some recordings where the
children play with each other without an investigator or a playmate.
All children-adult interactions were transcribed in full, including
repetitions, hesitations, child language forms of utterances, even nonsense
utterances. Short conversations with the parents which are concerning the
topic are also transcribed but longer ones are exluded.
The following table lists the ages at which each recording session took place
with reference to the time allocation, the investigator (interlocutor) and
the Matrix Language. The language mode is always bilingual or rather
trilingual, since the children share the three languages.
No. Date Duration Nasim Nabil Interlocutor M L.
1. 7/10/1994 13 min. 3; 0, 5 2; 0, 3 mother Eng.
2. 14/10/1994 10 min. 3; 0, 22 2; 0, 10 mother Eng.
3. 21/10/1994 25 min. 3; 0, 29 2; 0, 17 Zsuzsi Hung.
4. 28/10/1994 50 min. 3; 1, 6 2; 0, 24 Zsuzsi Hung.
5. 5/11/1994 25 min. 3; 1, 14 2; 1, 1 Zsuzsi Hung.
6. 10/11/1994 40 min. 3; 1, 19 2; 1, 6 Ildikó Hung.
7. 23/2/1995 60 min. 3; 5, 1 2; 4, 19 Judit, Zsolt Hung.
8. 9/3/1995 30 min. 3; 5, 14 2; 5, 5 Judit Hung.
9. 16/3/1995 60 min. 3; 5, 21 2; 5, 12 Judit Hung.
10. 30/3/1995 45 min. 3; 6, 8 2; 5, 26 Judit Hung.
11. 6/4/1995 30 min. 3; 6, 15 2; 6, 2 Judit, Robi Hung.
12. 11/4/1995 20 min. 3; 6, 20 2; 6, 7 mother Eng.
13. 13/4/1995 50 min. 3; 6, 22 2; 6, 9 Judit Hung.
14. 16/4/1995 55 min. 3; 6, 25 2; 6, 12 Judit, sons Hung.
15. 26/4/1995 10 min. 3; 7, 4 2; 6, 22 Zsolt Hung.
16. 3/5/1995 60 min. 3; 7, 11 2; 6, 29 Judit Hung.
17. 31/5/1995 30 min. 3; 8, 9 2; 7, 25 Judit Hung.
18. 25/6/1995 40 min. 3; 9, 3 2; 8, 21 Judit Hung.
19. 27/6/1995 25 min. 3; 9, 5 2; 8, 23 Judit Hung.
20. 15/7/1995 20 min. 3; 9, 23 2; 9, 11 Judit Hung.
21. 26/7/1995 45 min. 3; 10, 4 2; 9, 22 Judit Hung.
22. 15/12/1995 45 min. 4; 2, 23 3; 2, 21 Borika, Bori Hung.
23. 25/12/1995 15 min. 4; 3, 3 3; 2, 21 mother Eng.
24. 25/12/1995 30 min. 4; 3, 3 3; 2, 21 Hung.
25. 10/6/1996 10 min. 4; 8, 19 3; 8, 6 Judit Hung.
26. 20/6/1996 50 min. 4; 8, 29 3; 8, 16 Hung.
27. 20/9/1996 120 min. 4;11, 29 3;11, 16 Hajni, Anna Hung.
28. 1/12/1996 120 min. 5; 2, 9 4; 1, 27 Hajni, Anna Hung.
29. 20/4/1997 120 min. 5; 6, 29 4; 6, 16 Hajni, Anna Hung.
30. 20/4/1997 30 min. 5; 6, 29 4; 6, 16 Hajni, Anna Hung.
Researchers using these data should cite Navracsics (1999) The Acquisition of
Hungarian by Trilingual Children. Unpublished PhD dissertation.
Veszprém-Pécs.
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