new Spanish corpus

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  I am happy to announce the addition to the CHILDES database of a new
corpus of spoken narrative data from 111 Venezuelan school-aged children
collected by Martha Shiro in Caracas.  I have now broken up the various
Spanish corpora so that they can be retrieved separately over the web.  This
new corpus is shiro.zip and shiro.sit.  The readme follows.  Many thanks to
Martha for this excellent contribution.  Please note that audio data are
also available.

--Brian MacWhinney

The narratives in this data were collected by Martha Shiro of Universidad
Central de Venezuela. In this study, 113 Venezuelan children participated in
4 tasks which elicited 4 narrative types. The children, 56 first graders and
57 fourth graders, were selected from 3 public schools and 3 private
schools. Due to the characteristics of the Venezuelan educational system,
all 59 children interviewed in the 3 private schools come from high SES
families, and all 54 children from the 3 public schools come from low SES
families. 
The interviews consisted of an initial warming up conversation, where the
child talked about his or her personal background, followed by 4 types of
prompts which elicited 4 narrative types (the transcription is gemmed for
the narratives produced in the interview). A total of 444 narratives were
produced.
The personal narratives were elicited with the following tasks:

1. PERSONAL NARRATIVE, OPEN-ENDED PROMPT: the child was asked to tell a
story about a frightening experience (¿Te pasó algo que te haya dado un
susto? Cuéntame.)

2. PERSONAL NARRATIVE, STRUCTURED PROMPT: The interviewer modeled a short
personal anecdote and asked the child if something similar had ever happened
to him or her. The following 3 prompts were used to make sure that the child
would produce at least one story:

a. El otro día subí al Ávila y se me atravesó una culebra. Me asusté y salí
corriendo. ¿A ti te pasó algo parecido?
b. Ayer estaba cortando el pan. El cuchillo estaba afilado y en vez de
cortar el pan, me corté el dedo. Me salió mucha sangre y tuve que ir a la
clínica para que me curen ¿A ti te pasó algo así?
c. ¿Te llevaron alguna vez de emergencia al hospital?

3. FICTIONAL NARRATIVE, OPEN-ENDED PROMPT: The child was asked to tell the
story of a favorite film, video or TV program.

4. FICTIONAL NARRATIVE, STRUCTURED PROMPT: The child was shown a wordless
animated video (Picnic, Weston Woods, 1993) and asked to tell the story. The
film was shown twice and the children retold the story after the second
viewing to the researcher who was not present when the film was projected
and pretended not to be familiar with the story.

Each file has an ID that can be interpreted as follows:
    
111.SL.87.M=CHI 
111= ID number
SL= School initials (SL, PE, IGN stand for the 3 private schools, RG, LE,
FR, stand for the 3 public schools).
87= age in months (7 years 3 months).
M= male (F= female).
Transcriptions follow the conventions of CHAT format and most of them are
divided into clauses [c].
The Spanish spoken by the children is the Venezuelan variety (from the
capital, Caracas) and only a few phonological deletions are signaled in the
transcription (e.g. pa'  which is used for the preposition para).
Publications that make use of this corpus should cite any of the following:

Shiro, M. 1997 Getting the story across: A discourse analysis approach to
evaluative stance in Venezuelan children¹s narratives. Unpublished Doctoral
Dissertation. Harvard University.
Shiro, M. 2000a. Los pequeños cuentacuentos. Cuadernos de Lengua y Habla, 2,
319-337.
Shiro, M. 2000b. Diferencias sociales en la construcción del yo y del otro:
Expresiones evaluativas en las narraciones de niños caraqueños en edad
escolar. In de Bustos Tovar et al. Lengua, discurso, texto, (Vol. 1,
pp.1303-1318). Madrid: Universidad Complutense & Visor Libros.

The recordings of the interviews have been digitalized on 37 CD¹s entitled
Corpus del habla de niños caraqueños en edad escolar 1996, Instituto de
Filología ³Andrés Bello², Universidad Central de Venezuela. Anyone
interested in acquiring the audio portion of the transcripts should write to
Martha Shiro (mshiro at reacciun.ve).