The CHILDES database (Links to an external site.) https://childes.talkbank.org/
(Child language data extraction system) is a publicly available corpus of child language transcripts from research studies. Download and review the excerpt below from a language transcript from Perez (2002)
(Links to an external site.) https://childes.talkbank.org/access/Biling/Perez.html
of an interaction between a 24-month old simultaneous Spanish-English bilingual child and his father.
Language Transcript
Answer the following questions. (Your responses to each question should be 1-3 sentences, or a bulleted list)
1. Based on the readings and your knowledge of child language development, what can you infer about this child’s expressive and receptive language abilities (based on this transcript).
Consider the child’s syntactic, semantic, pragmatic abilities and describe at least 3 features/skills you notice (e.g., grammatical morphemes, types of responses/questions, communicative intentions, sentence structures).
2. Drawing on the assigned reading about bilingual language acquisition, how would you characterize the child’s language dominance based on this transcript? (English-dominant, Spanish-dominant, balanced-bilingual)
3. (a) Identify and list 3 examples of code-switching by the child.
(b) How would you characterize the child’s code-switching. Did the codeswitching occur within an utterance (e.g., “I want agua”) or between utterances (e.g., “I’m thirsty. Quiero agua”)?
(c) What purpose do you think the child’s code-switching serves? (Make an educated guess. This is subjective and you don’t have enough information to actually determine the child’s motivation for codeswitching).
4. (a) Identify and list 3 examples of code-switching by the father.
(b) How would you characterize the father’s code-switching?
(c) what purpose do you think the father’s code-switching serves?
