CHILDES Palestinian Arabic Nazzal Corpus

Tala Nazzal
Department of Applied and Allied Medical Sciences
An-Najah National University
t.nazzal@najah.edu

Participants:	11
Type of Study:	longitudinal
Location:	Palestine
Media type:	audio
DOI:	doi:10.21415/VJYY-KA80

Citation information

Nazzal, T. and A. Gavarró, A corpus analysis of child and child-directed speech in Palestinian Arabic: A first approach to syntactic development. Journal of Child Language, 2025: p. 1–16. pdf

Nazzal, T., J. Zhu, and A. Gavarró, Early knowledge of word order in Palestinian Arabic: An eye-tracking study. Language Acquisition, 2025: p. 1–16. pdf

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

There is to date no spontaneous production data for child and child-directed speech for any Arabic variety. The purpose of this corpus is to provide a first corpus of child production, as well as child-directed speech, for Palestinian Arabic. The data were collected from February to July 2021 from 11 healthy monolingual Palestinian Arabic speaking children aged between 2;0 and 6;5 years old and their parents in Hebron, Jaljuliya, Jenin, Nablus, Qalqilya, Taybeh, Toulkarm in Palestine.

Birthdates and cities of children are:

01 8/31/21 Taybeh
02 5/8/19 Toulkam
03 2/1/17 Hebron
04 8/1/19 Nablus
05 8/21/17 Hebron
06 8/5/17 Jenin
07 7/6/16 Nablus
08 6/5/18 Qalqilya
09 3/6/17 Toulkam
10 5/8/18 Jaljuliya
11 3/26/17 Toulkam

None of the children were premature, none had a hearing impairment, or any other disease or impairment and all are middle class. Most recording are done with the Mother or Mother and father at home. Some have the Aunt at home.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Anna Gavarró, for the patient guidance, encouragement, constructive feedback she has provided throughout the building of this corpus. I would also like to thank my speech pathologist colleague Sondos Srouji and my student Shireen Odeh, who carried out part of the data transcription in Arabic. I am particularly endebted to the Palestinian children and their parents who agreed to participate in this research, without whom we would not have been able to carry it out.