CHILDES Portuguese AlegreX (Cross-sectional) Corpus


Ana Maria Guimarães


Participants: 100
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: Brazil
Media type: no longer available
DOI: doi:10.21415/T5FW2T

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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

Since 1991, a group of Brazilian researchers in Porto Alegre has been working to establish a database on the language development of children from 5 to 9 years of age. This research focuses on language development in the period of the acquisition of literacy. The project is named “Language development in children during the literacy period.” The main goal of this project is to establish a data archive for doctoral students. The data are collected both cross-sectionally and longitudinally.There are 180 cross-sectional participants, divided into 8 groups with 20 participants in each, sampled at 6-month intervals. There are 6 participants in the longitudinal study who have been followed five times a year, since 1992. All of the participants are middle-class students from private schools in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Porto Alegre, the capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, is located on the left bank of the Guaibaís river. With a territory of 497 square kilometers and nearly 3 million inhabitants, the metropolitan area has an intense cultural life built around two universities, museums and several theaters. The longitudinal data are in the directory “AlegreLong”. The cross-sectional data are in the directory “AlegreX”. The age ranges of the 8 AlegreX cross-sectional groups are: The seven children in the AlegreLong longitudinal corpus are given in the following table. The data from CAM are not yet included in the database.
Child Gender Age
ALEfemale4;8.7 to 8;10.11
CAMfemale4;11.14 to 8;9.17
CARfemale4;3:7 to 8;5.1
GABmale5;9.19 to 9;0.17
MATmale6;2.3 to 9;0.2
NATfemale5;4.2 to 8.9.24
RODmale5;5.1 to 7;7.2
All data were collected in interview situation between a female adult and the child. All interviews took place in the school the child was attending or in the home, and lasted approximately 30 minutes. There were three elicitation tasks that were designed to provide a representative sampling of the child’s linguistic capabilities:
  1. Dialogue between the investigator and the children during which the experimenter asks questions about school, home, or significant events in the child’s life (like his or her birthday).
  2. Personal narrative (oral and written) in which the aim was to encourage the child to report on a meaningful event, at school or at home.
  3. Narrative from sequential pictures.
  4. For 20% of the participants there are also data from two additional tasks:
  5. Free conversation between children (dyads), and
  6. Retelling of a story the child had listened to before.
There are two master’s dissertations in progress based on this data. One of them looks for the emergence of narrative voices and the other analyses the use of aspect to distinguish narrative foreground and background. We are also developing a new project on spatial expression in children’s narratives, in collaboration with Drs. Faria and Batoréo of the University of Lisbon in Portugal.