Rigol corpus

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
     I would like to announce the addition to CHILDES of a new major  
corpus of data on the acquisition of German.  This corpus was  
collected and transcribed by Rosemarie Rigol between 1990 and 2003.   
Retranscription of the data into CHAT was supported by funds from the  
Max-Planck-Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and  
supervised by Heike Behrens.  The files currently in CHILDES are from  
three children (Cosima, Pauline, and Sebastian). These files are  
linked to audio media. The earliest files begin after birth and the  
children are each followed at monthly or bimonthly intervals until  
age 7.  So, in terms of the period of coverage, these files may  
represent the longest time period of recordings from single children.  
The files currently in CHILDES are from three children, but the  
complete database includes recordings from 21 children.  Rosemarie  
Rigol continues to transcribe the remaining data and all of the video  
media are now being contributed to CHILDES for archival purposes.   
The total corpus includes 1900 30-minute recordings.  Of the 21  
children, 19 come from a rural community in Hessen and to from  
Osnabrück.
    I would like to express my appreciation to Rosemarie Rigol for  
the enormous contribution she is making here to the study of the  
development of German child language and to Heike Behrens and the MPI  
Leipzig for bringing the data into such a wonderful shape for  
addition to the database.  I look forward to seeing many interesting  
new analyses of this new corpus.

--Brian MacWhinney