Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.22210/strjez/53-1/4
Building MaLi, a Croatian-Italian bilingual child corpus
Mia Batinić Angster
orcid.org/0000-0001-9470-2326
; Sveučilište u Zadru
Marco Angster
orcid.org/0000-0001-8295-7866
; Sveučilište u Zadru
Abstract
The knowledge we have about language and first language acquisition would not have been
unveiled in the absence of previous efforts in collecting language data, e.g., recording the
spontaneous interactions between children and adults. The CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000)
gathers child speech in many of the world’s languages, including Croatian (documented
in Kovačević’s 2002 corpus). In this paper, we describe the construction of MaLi, a
corpus documenting the language productions of two bilingual children acquiring Croatian
and Italian simultaneously. After a short survey of the methods used in collecting child language
data with special regard to diary notes and audio recordings, we discuss the background
and the details of the data collected in MaLi: we provide an overview of the sociolinguistic
context of bilingual first language acquisition of the children observed and a description of
the structure of the corpus. We first devote our attention to the data collection, management,
and coding of the diary notes. Afterwards, we examine the collection and elaboration of the
audio recordings and their ongoing transcription. In our concluding remarks, we offer a short
assessment of the advantages and limits of the corpus along with a survey of the future possibilities
for the use of this resource.
Keywords
language documentation; child language; corpus; early bilingualism; simultaneous bilingualism; first language acquisition
Hrčak ID:
321636
URI
Publication date:
10.10.2024.
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