CHILDES Italian Burgato Corpus


Lara Burgato
Developmental and Social Psychology
University of Padua

Gaia Lucarini
Developmental and Social Psychology
University of Padua

Benedetta Colavolpa
Developmental and Social Psychology
University of Padua

Judit Gervain
Developmental and Social Psychology
University of Padua

Participants: 7
Type of Study: longitudinal
Location: Italy
Media type: not available
DOI: xxx

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Citation information

Lucarini, G., Colavolpe, B., Burgato, L., Gervain, J. (under review). The Development of Italian Vocabulary, Morphology and Syntax: an Observational Study.

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

The corpus was collected to investigate how combinatoriality emerges in early Italian language acquisition, both in morphology and syntax, and its link to vocabulary growth.

The corpus is composed by 30 transcriptions and audio-recordings of 7 children collected between 2021 and 2022. Children (6 males; 1 female) were recruited from a family daycare service in the North-East of Italy and their spontaneous productions were collected to evaluate the complexity and productivity of children’s early speech.

The children, according to parental reports, had no known neurological, auditory, or language-related pathologies, they were all Italian monolingual speakers with both parents being native Italian speakers. Data were collected in two phases: Phase 1 (01/06/2021 - 20/08/2021) and Phase 2 (03/01/2022 - 05/04/2022). At the beginning of data collection, the children were between 1;6-2;5 years of age (m=1;11.2, SD=0;3.7) and at the end of the study, the age range was 2;4-3;1 year (m=2;9, SD=0;3). One infant (CHI1) dropped out, while another one (CHI7) entered the study after Phase 1. To assess children's vocabulary, the Italian version of the MacArthur-Bates CDI (Caselli et al., 2015) was administered. The questionnaires were administered twice, once in Phase 1 and once in Phase 2. All children were within the normal range (>5th percentile) on the MacArthur-Bates CDI in both Phases 1 & 2.
Child Phase 1 Range Phase 2 Range 1st CDI 2nd CDI
CHI1 2;5.17-2;8.5 NA-NA 2;7.11 NA
CHI2 1;10.30-2;1.18 2;6.1-2;9.2 2;0.24 NA
CHI3 1;11.3-2;1.22 2;6.5-2;9.6 2;0.27 2;8.5
CHI4 1;10.18-2;1.6 2;5.20-2;8.21 2;0.13 NA
CHI5 1;6.6-1;8.25 2;1.8-2;4.9 1;8.0 2;3.8
CHI6 2;1.2-2;3.21 2;8.4-2;11.5 2;2.26 2;10.4
CHI7 NA-NA 2;10.24-3;1.25 NA 3;0.24

Acknowledgments

The research related to the recording of this corpus has been funded by an ERC Consolidator Grant “BabyRhythm 773202”, FARE grant nr. R204MPRHKE from the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research, PNRR- MAD-2022–12376739 Grant (“SYNPHONIA” Next Generation EU – PNRR M6C2 - Investimento 2.1 Valorizzazione e potenziamento della ricerca biomedica del SSN CUP C93C22009100007), MUR 2022WX3FM5 PRIN grant [Bando PRIN 2022 CUP C53D23004290006, Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (PNRR), Missione 4, Componente 2 – Investimento 1.1. “Progetti di ricerca di Rilevante Interesse Nazionale” – PRIN].