PhonBank German PAIDUS Corpus

Conxita Lleo Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences University of Hamburg conxitalleo75@gmail.com

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Citation information

Lleó, Conxita & Michael Prinz (1996). Consonant clusters in child phonology and the directionality of syllable structure assignment. Journal of Child Language 23, 31-56.

Lleó, Conxita & Michael Prinz (1997). Syllable Structure parameters and the acquisition of affricates. In S.J. Hannahs & M. Young-Scholten (eds.), Focus on Phonological Acquisition, 143-163. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.

Kehoe, Margaret & Conxita Lleó (2003a). The acquisition of nuclei: a longitudinal analysis of phonological vowel length in three German-speaking children. Journal of Child Language 30 (3), 527-556.

Kehoe, Margaret & Conxita Lleó (2003b). A Phonological Analysis of Schwa in German First Language Acquisition. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 48 (3/4), 289-327.

Lleó, C. (in press). Acquisition of speech sound. In Ulrike Domahs & Beatrice Primus (eds.), Laut, Gebärde, Buchstabe 'Sound, sign, letter'. 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 project PAIDUS was carried out at the University of Hamburg (Department of Romance Languages). The project began in 1990 first as BIDS, with the goal of comparing the phonetic characteristics of babbling in German with babbling in Spanish. With this purpose, a collaboration with Antonio Maldonado of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (Dept. of Psychology) was started and we applied for a joint grant from the Acciones Integradas program, so that the two teams could get together in order to plan the methodology at various stages of the project. The German data were collected in Hamburg, Germany, and the Spanish data in Madrid, Spain.

The German part of this project recorded 5 children: Bernd, Britta, Marion, Thomas and Johannes. All five children had been born in Hamburg and lived there. Their parents were German and spoke the Northern variety of German. The children were visited from very early on, before they began to produce their first words, as we wanted to study their babbling, too. Some informal tests, in order to figure their (passive) vocabularies were conducted. After the children began saying words, we continued recording them within the PAIDUS project, which had as its goal to find out how phonological parameters were possibly fixed for German as opposed to Spanish. The German children were visited every two weeks at first, and later on once a month. Recordings were done at the children’s homes by two research assistants of the project. At first, the mother used to be present, but later on, we made most of the recordings with the child alone interacting with one research assistant. We tried to record the child under spontaneous conditions, playing, chatting, etc. We also brought some objects (little animals or toys) in order to elicit certain words from all children, making the phonetic and phonological characteristics of their productions comparable. We encouraged the mothers to keep a record of words that were new in the child’s vocabularies, and we tried to elicit them, as well. We also used books with pictures, which belonged to the child and others that we brought. The recordings were audio recordings, and in order not to miss the ambient setting and context, one of the researchers was writing down all possible details, including what the child was doing, while the other assistant was interacting with the child.

This corpus was financed by the DFG with grant to Conxita Lleó, BIDS from 1990 until 1991 and PAIDUS from 1991 until 1994. Research Assistants were Christliebe El Mogharbel, Kerstin Feuge, and Michael Prinz. Grants from the Acciones Integradas program were obtained from 1991 to 1994, to record and study Spanish data.

Researchers interested in using the PAIDUS data should send a copy of their publication based on the data to the contributor of the data (lleo@uni-hamburg.de)

Acknowledgements