PhonBank German L2 VYSA Corpus

Anne Vainikka (1958-2018) Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences University of Delaware website

Martha Young-Scholten School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics Newcastle University martha.young-scholten@ncl.ac.uk

Citation information

Young-Scholten, Martha and Monika Langer. 2015. The role of orthographic input in L2 German: Evidence from naturalistic adult learners’ production. Applied Psycholinguistics 36(1):93-114.

Young-Scholten, Martha & Anne Vainikka. 2011. The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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 acronym VYSA for this corpus stands for Vainikka and Young-Scholten's Americans. Recordings for this study were from participants spending a year abroad learning German while living with German-speaking host families and attending German secondary schools in standard German-speaking urban and peri-urban regions of Germany. None of the three had prior exposure to German, there were no special German classes for them at their secondary schools and there were no other exchange students at their schools. The study took place in the 1990s before the wide-spread use of digital devices and social media, which meant that participants spent their free time interacting in German rather than in English. Recordings were made in a quiet room at each participant’s host family’s home or in another quiet location. Utterances were spontaneous in nature through conversations between the researcher and the participant. In addition, participants also took a range of broad and narrow elicitation tasks to better examine their production of morphosyntax and phonology.

Name	Age	# Sessions	Sex
Joan	16	6	F
Paul	17	4	M
George	15	4	M