PhonBank English Smith Corpus

Neil Smith
Department of Linguistics
University College London

website

Participants:	1
Type of Study:	naturalistic diary study
Location:	UK
Media type:	note cards only
DOI:	doi:10.21415/T5VP60

Citation information

Smith, Neilson V. (1973). The Acquisition of Phonology: A Case Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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 child in the case study, Amahl, is the son of an English father with some derivations from “received pronunciations” and Indian mother who speaks English only as a fourth language (following Hindi, Bengali, Marathi). Amahl was born in Boston, Massachusetts and moved to the U.K. at approximately one year of age, which may have influenced his late speaking. The child lived with his paternal aunt from 19 months to 2 years, and started attending day nurseries and play groups in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire at 30 months.

The data discussed were recorded in IPA transcriptions on index cards from age 2;2.1 to age 3;9.14. Some tape recordings were made occasionally, however, most of the description is based on non-recorded material. There were instances of spontaneous speech, however the majority of the words were elicited with phrases such as “can you say “zink” for me?”. This corpus was retyped and adapted from the original diary study. A significant portion of this work was undertaken by Tania Zamuner; additional work was performed under an FCAR grant to Heather Goad. The recording dates in the corpus correspond to the first date of Smith's (1973) descriptive stages. Please note that the data have not been entirely rechecked from Smith's original transcriptions. Careful spot-checking however suggests that the conversion is accurate. Please feel free to contact us in case you have questions or if you notice any errors.