PhonBank English Inkelas Corpus

Sharon Inkelas Linguistics University of California inkelas@berkeley.edu website

Browsable transcripts

Phon data

CHAT data

Citation information

Inkelas, Sharon & Yvan Rose. 2003. Velar Fronting Revisited. In Barbara Beachley, Amanda Brown & Fran Conlin (eds.), Proceedings of the 27th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 334-345. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Inkelas, Sharon & Yvan Rose. 2007. Positional Neutralization: A Case Study from Child Language. Language 83, 707-736.

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

Participant Name	Age Range	Sessions	Sex
E	0;06.08-3;09.28	200	M

This study is based primarily on a new longitudinal corpus from E, a typically developing monolingual learner of English with no history of hearing problems or language delays. E has one sibling, a brother who is two years and five months older and who also exhibited normal phonological development. E’s mother is a native speaker of American English. E’s father is a native speaker of Turkish, but fluent in English; his slight Turkish accent is unlikely to have been a factor in E’s phonological patterns. During the course of language development, E was raised in a monolingual English-speaking environment. He was exposed to minimal amounts of Turkish but was virtually never addressed directly in this language. As of age 2;7, due to his sibling’s entry into a Spanish immersion school program, E began to be exposed to some Spanish, including the word hola, but not by native Spanish speakers.

The data from E were gathered in a naturalistic, diary setting primarily by his mother, a trained phonologist. E’s father, also a phonologist, participated in the data collection as well. Data collection was performed as often as possible, during unstructured sessions and regular family activities. The period of data gathering spans E’s ages 0;06.09 to 3;09.29, with most of the data collected prior to the last year of the study. Between ages 0;06.09 and 2;09.09, a span that corresponds to E’s phonological development peak (i.e. during which most aspects of the target grammar were acquired), a total of 3,267 words (distributed over 1,713 utterances) were transcribed phonetically. An additional 113 words were transcribed over the last year of the study, during which E’s mother was attending mainly to the development of /l/.