CHILDES Italian-German Siena Corpus

Vicenzo Moscati Social, Political, and Cognitive Science University of Siena vicenzo.moscati@unisi.it

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Project Description

The corpus contains 205 files from a single child, Frida, a typically developing child predominantly exposed to Italian. She attended an Italian-speaking nursery school in Florence (Italy) from the age of 0;6. Frida has also been exposed to German as a minority language spoken at home by her mother, a balanced Italian-German bilingual speaker.

The entire corpus has been collected over a period of 18 months, from the age of 1;6 to 2;11 and it consists of more than 76 hours of spontaneous and child-directed speech. On average, Frida has been recorded for more than 4 hours/week. All the recordings were made at home, the only environment where German is occasionally used. Therefore, the transcriptions tend to over-represent the German input.

Recordings were made using a professional Zoom H2 recorder. Transcriptions were completed with the assistance of trained undergraduate students at the University of Siena, using the CHAT format and ELAN software. All files were double-checked for internal consistency. >p>From a descriptive point of view, Frida’s language development is >generally in line with typical monolingual development for what >concerns Italian. In German, she produces only a limited number of >words and short sentences.