PhonBank Catalan Esteve/Prieto Corpus

Núria Esteve-Gibert
Linguistics
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
nuria.esteve@upf.edu
website

Pilar Prieto
Linguistics
Universitat Pompeu Fabra
pilar.prieto@upf.edu
website

Participants:	4
Type of Study:	naturalistic
Location:	Alt Penedès, Catalonia
Media type:	video
DOI:	doi:10.21415/T55K6R

Citation information

Esteve-Gibert, N. (2010). The Development of Prosodic Patterns in Catalan-babbling infants. MA thesis dissertation. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.

Esteve-Gibert, N. (2014). "The integration of prosodic and gestural cues in early infants' intentional communication". PhD thesis dissertation. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.

Esteve-Gibert, N. & Prieto, P. (2013) "Prosody signals the emergence of intentional communication in the first year of life: evidence from Catalan-babbling infants". Journal of Child Language 40(5), 919-944.

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

Name	Age Range	Sessions	Sex
An	0;07.10-0;11.22	17	F
Bi	0;06.05-0;11.25	17	M
Ma	0;06.20-0;11.25	21	M
On	0;05.25-0;06.18	4	F

We analyzed this longitudinal corpus of four Catalan-babbling infants to investigate whether children use different prosodic patterns to distinguish communicative from investigative vocalizations and to express intentionality. A total of 2,701 vocalizations from 0;7 to 0;11 were coded acoustically (by marking pitch range and duration), gesturally, and pragmatically (by marking communicative status and specific pragmatic function). The results showed that communicative vocalizations were shorter and had a wider pitch range than investigative vocalizations and that these patterns in communicative vocalizations depended on the intention of the vocalizations: requests and expressions of discontent displayed wider pitch range and longer duration than responses or statements. These results support the hypothesis that babbling children can successfully use a set of prosodic patterns to signal intentional speech.

All parents of the four participants speak exclusively Catalan to their child and to each other. Parents were asked about their linguistic habits through a questionnaire, and results showed that all four mothers have Catalan-speaking parents, have lived in Catalonia all their lives, and have Catalan as their first language (L1). They use Catalan in all dealings with their family, work colleagues, and friends. As for fathers, three of them have Catalan-speaking parents, and have always lived in Catalonia. Catalan is their L1 as well as the vehicular language for family, work, and friends. An’s father, however, has Spanish-speaking parents and uses Spanish as the primary language for communicating with his parents and work colleagues. However, he speaks and writes Catalan fluently, and uses it with his wife, daughter, and friends. The children come from four small towns in the same region of Catalonia, Alt Penedes, located 50 km to the south of Barcelona.