[full article and abstract in English]
This paper describes The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language and its possible applications for modern studies on the first language acquisition. First of all, the procedure of data collection for the Corpus is discussed. Furthermore, the main methodological principles of longitudinal and experimental data compilation and transciption are decribed. Finally, different studies in developmental psycholinguistics which have been carried out so far and which demonstrate possible ways of the application of the Corpus data for different scientific purposes are introduced.
The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language developed at Vytautas Magnus University comprises typical and atypical, longitudinal and experimental data of the Lithuanian language development. The Corpus was compiled using different methodological approaches, such as natural observation and semi-experiment. The longitudinal data (conversations between the target children and their caretakers) compiled according to the requirement of natural observation includes transcribed and morphologically annotated speech of two typically-developing children, one late talker, one early talker, one child from a low SES family, and a pair of twins. The data was collected during the period of 1993–2017 and and it can be divided into three cohorts. The semi-experimentaldata (~ 124 hours) comes from numerous studies in narratives and spontaneous dialogues elicited from typically-developing and language-impaired monolingual and bilingual (pre-) school age children.
From the very beginning of data collection for the The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language, studies in the develomental changes of typical child language have been carried out. Over the past decade, these studies have been supplemented by statistical analysis of elicited semi-experimental data; the majority of these studies deal with typical vs. atypical (delayed or impaired) language acquisition and with differences between acquision of Lithuanian in a monolingual vs. bi-/polylingual settings.
The paper provides an overview of data of The Corpus of Lithuanian Children’s Language, which have been collected from 1993 but still needed to be structurized according to the employed methodology of data compilation and possible applications for different scientific purposes.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida. 2009. Pokalbio struktūros analizė kalbos įsisavinimo požiūriu. [Analysis of conversational structure from the perspective of language acquisition]. Humanitarinių mokslų daktaro disertacija. [PhD dissertation]. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida. 2012. Lithuanian narrative language at preschool age. Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics 8, 21–36. https://doi.org/10.5128/ERYa8.02
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida. 2013. Linguistic disfluency in narrative speech: Evidence from story-telling in 6-year olds. INTERSPEECH 2013 – 14th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, August 25–29, Lyon, France, Proceedings. 2143–2146.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida, Jolita Ančlauskaitė. 2011. Nurodymų raiška priešmokyklinio amžiaus vaikų kalboje. [Directives among Lithuanian preschoolers]. Filologija 16, 5–18.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida, Ineta Dabašinskienė. 2012. DVRPAM – Dvikalbių vaikų rišliojo pasakojimo analizės metodika. [A tool for narrative analysis in bilingual children]. MAIN: Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives. ZaSPil Nr. 56 – December 2012. Berlin: ZAS. http://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/zaspil.html?&L=1.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida, Ineta Dabašinskienė, Agnė Blažienė. 2017. Narrative production of children acquiring Lithuanian as a heritage language. Paper presented at the 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language. Lyon: IASCL, University Lyon 2.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida, Agnė Kalninytė. 2014. Priešmokyklinio amžiaus vaikų rišliojo pasakojimo ypatybės. [The main characteristics of narrative in preschoolers]. Kalbos kultūra 86, 212–236.
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida, Aleksandr N. Kornev. 2016. Linguistic disfluency in story-telling: Evidence from Lithuanian- and Russian-speaking preschoolers. Pediatr 7 (1), 142–147. https://doi.org/10.17816/PED71142-146
Balčiūnienė, Ingrida, Inga Miklovytė. 2011. Lietuvių vaikų ir suaugusiųjų kalbos vidutinis pasakymo ilgis. [MLU in Lithuanian Children and Adult Speech]. Res Humanitariae 2 (10), 302–313.
Bishop, Dorothy V. M., Sonia J. Bishop. 1998. "Twin language": A risk factor for language impairment? Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research 41, 150–160. https://doi.org/10.1044/jslhr.4101.150
Blažienė, Agnė. 2016. Lietuvių vaikų leksikos ir gramatikos raida anglakalbėje aplinkoje. [Lexical and grammatical development of Lithuanian children in an English-speaking environment]. Humanitarinių mokslų daktaro disertacija [PhD dissertation]. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University.
Botting, Nicola. 2002. Narrative as a tool for the assessment of linguistic and pragmatic impairments. Child Language Teaching and Therapy 18 (1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1191/0265659002ct224oa
Clark, Eve V. 2009. First language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511806698
Dabašinskienė, Ineta, Violeta Kalėdaitė. 2012. Child language acquisition research in the Baltic area. Journal of Baltic Studies 43 (2), 151–160. https://doi.org/10.1080/01629778.2012.674793
Dabašinskienė, Ineta, Laura Kamandulytė. 2009. Corpora of spoken Lithuanian. Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics 5, 67–77. https://doi.org/10.5128/ERYa5.05
Dabašinskienė, Ineta, Maria D. Voeikova. 2015. Diminutives in spoken Lithuanian and Russian: Pragmatic functions and structural properties. In Contemporary approaches to Baltic linguistics. Peter Arkadiev, Axel Holvoet & Björn Wiemer, eds. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 203–234. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110343953-005
Eisenbeiss, Sonja. 2010. Production methods in language acquisition research. In Experimental methods in language acquisition research. Elma Blom & Sharon Unsworth, eds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 11–34. https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.27.03eis
Gagarina, Natalia, Daleen Klop, Sari Kunnari, Koula Tantele, Taina Välimaa, Ingrida Balčiūnienė, Uta Bohnacker, Joel Walters. 2012. MAIN: Multilingual assessment instrument for narratives, ZAS Papers in Linguistics 56. Berlin: ZAS.
Gagarina, Natalia, Daleen Klop, Sari Kunnari, Koula Tantele, Taina Välimaa, Ingrida Balčiūnienė, Uta Bohnacker, Joel Walters. 2015. Assessment of narrative abilities in bilingual children. In Assessing multilingual children. Sharon Armon-Lotem, Jan de Jong & Natalia Meir, eds. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. 243–269. https://doi.org/10.21832/9781783093137-011
Hayashi, Chisato, Hirosi Mikami, Reiko Nishihara, Chihi Maeda, Kazuo Hayakawa. 2013. The relationship between twin language, twins' close ties, and social competence. Twin Research and Human Genetics 17 (1), 27–37. https://doi.org/10.1017/thg.2013.83
Hayward, Denyse, Phyllis Schneider. 2000. Effectiveness of teaching story grammar knowledge to pre-school children with language impairment: An exploratory study. Child Language Teaching and Therapy 16 (3), 255–284. https://doi.org/10.1177/026565900001600303
Hedberg, Natalie L., Carol Stoel-Gammon. 1986. Narrative analysis: Clinical procedures. Topics in Language Disorders 7 (1), 58–69. https://doi.org/10.1097/00011363-198612000-00008
Hedberg, Natalie L., Carol E. Westby. 1993. Analyzing storytelling skills. Theory to practice. Tucson, AZ: Communication Skill Builders.
Hickmann, Maya. 2003. Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hughes, Diana, LaRae McGillivray, Mark Schmidek. 1997. Guide to narrative language: Procedures for assessment. PRO-ED.
Kamandulytė, Laura. 2009. Lietuvių kalbos būdvardžio įsisavinimas: leksinės ir morfosintaksinės ypatybės. [Acquisition of Lithuanian adjective: lexical and morphosyntactic features]. Humanitarinių mokslų daktaro disertacija. [PhD dissertation]. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University.
Kamandulytė, Laura, Bettina Fürst, Wolfgang U. Dressler, Ulli Sauerland. 2010. On the acquisition of adjective gradation in Lithuanian and German. Darbai ir dienos 54, 267–276.
Kamandulytė-Merfeldienė, Laura. 2015. The acquisition of Lithuanian adjectives: Lexical ad morphological features. In Semantics and morphology of early adjectives in first language acquisition. Elena Tribushinina, Maria D. Voeikova & Sabrina Noccetti, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 313–346. Kazakovskaya, Victoria V., Ingrida Balčiūnienė. 2012. Interrogatives in Russian and Lithuanian child-directed speech: Do we communicate with our children in the same way? Journal of Baltic Studies 43 (2), 197–218.
Kazakovskaya, Victoria V., Ingrida Balčiūnienė. 2015. Adult contribution towards early adjective acquisition: Evidence from Russian and Lithuanian longitudinal data. In Semantics and morphology of early adjectives in fi language acquisition. Elena Tribushinina, Maria D. Voeikova & Sabrina Noccetti, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 243–312.
Kilani-Schoch, Marianne, Ingrida Balčiūnienė, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabine Laaha, Wolfgang U. Dressler, 2009. On the role of pragmatics in child-directed speech for the acquisition of verb morphology. Journal of Pragmatics 41, 219–239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2008.10.001
Lounela, Mikko. 2005. Exploring morphologically analysed text material. In Inquiries into words, constraints and contexts. antti arppe Lauri Carlson, Krister Lindén, Jussi Piitulainen, Mickael Suominen, Martti Vainio, Hanna Westerlund, Anssi Yli- Jyrä, eds. Stanford: Stanford University, 259–267.
MacWhinney, Brian. 2017a. Tools for analyzing talk. Part 1: The CHAT program. Available at: http://talkbank.org/manuals/CHAT.pdf. Accessed: 19 August 2017.
MacWhinney, Brian. 2017b. Tools for analyzing talk. Part 2: The CLAN program. Available at: http://talkbank.org/manuals/CLAN.pdf. Accessed 19 August 2017.
McCabe, Allyssa, Pamela Rosenthal Rollins. 1994. Assessment of preschool narrative skills. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 3, 45–56. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360.0301.45
McCabe, allyssa, Lynn S. Bliss. 2003. Patterns of narrative discourse. Boston: Allyn & Bacon.
McTear, Michael. 1985. Children's conversation. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Pan, Barbara A., Catherine E. Snow. 1999. The development of conversational and discourse skills. In The development of language. M. Barrett, ed. Psychology Press.
Pinker, Steven. 1984. Language learnability and language development. Harvard University Press.
Savickienė, Ineta. 1999. Lietuvio vaiko daiktavardžio morfologija. [The acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology]. Humanitarinių mokslų daktaro disertacija. [PhD dissertation]. Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University.
Savickienė, Ineta. 2003. The acquisition of Lithuanian noun morphology. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Savickienė, Ineta, Wolfgang U. Dressler, eds. 2007. The acquisition of diminutives: a cross-linguistic perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.43
Savickienė, Ineta, Vera Kempe, Patricia J. Brooks. 2009. Acquisition of gender agreement in Lithuanian: exploring the effect of diminutive usage in an elicited production task. Journal of Child Language 36, 477–494. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000908009100
Snow, Catherine E. 1977. The development of conversation between mothers and babies. Journal of Child Language 4, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000900000453
Stephany, Ursula, Maria D. Voeikova, eds. 2009. Development of nominal inflection in first language acquisition: a cross-linguistic perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110217117
Thorpe, Karen. 2006. Twin children's language development. Early Human Development 82, 387–395. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.earlhumdev.2006.03.012
Thorpe, Karen, Rosemary Greenwood, Areana Eivers, Michael Rutter. 2001. Prevalence and developmental course of 'secret language'. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders 36 (1), 43–62. https://doi.org/10.1080/13682820150217563
Tribushinina, Elena, Huub van den Bergh, Marianne Kilani-Schoch, Ayhan Aksu-Koç, Ineta Dabašinskienė, Gordana Hrzica, Katharina Korecky-Kröll, Sabrina Noccetti, Wolfgang U. Dressler. 2013. The role of explicit contrast in adjective acquisition. First Language 33 (6), 594–616. https://doi.org/10.1177/0142723713503146
Tribushinina, Elena, Maria D. Voeikova, Sabrina Noccetti, eds. 2015. Semantics and morphology of early adjectives in first language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Westerveld, Marleen F., Gail T. Gillon, Catherine Moran. 2008. a longitudinal investigation of oral narrative skills in children with mixed reading disability. International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology 10 (3), 132–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/14417040701422390
Voeikova, Maria D., Wolfgang U. Dressler, eds. 2002. Pre- and protomorphology: early phases of morphological development in nouns and verbs. München: Lincom.
Wójcik, Pawel. 2000. The acquisition of Lithuanian verb morphology: a case study. Kraków: Quartis.