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A morphologically annotated longitudinal corpus of spoken Czech child–adult interactions

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Abstract

The paper presents a longitudinal corpus of transcribed spontaneous child–adult interactions in Czech. It consists of 99,388 tokens in 42,103 utterances produced by seven children between ca 1.5 and 3.5 years of age, and 238,211 tokens in 61,252 utterances produced by their close caregivers in everyday situations at home. The corpus covers language production of the children from the mean length of 1.01 word per utterance up to 5.33 words per utterance. The length of the recorded period ranges for individual children from 11 to 27 months. The transcripts of both child and adult utterances were lemmatized and tagged using MorphoDiTa, a tool for automatic morphological analysis of Czech. The annotation was transformed into the MOR format used within CHILDES, a database dedicated to corpora of first language acquisition. Detailed manual checking was performed on the annotation of all children’s utterances. Data from three children were used for a comparison of part-of-speech classification before and after manual checking, data from one child was additionally analyzed for differences in morphological tagging proper. The number of differences was rather low, with (expected) limitations in the areas of part-of-speech classification for uninflected words, annotation of homonymous forms, and annotation of child-specific words. The corpus represents an important contribution to the research of child language with special significance for Slavic languages and other morphologically rich inflecting languages, which are still underrepresented in the study of first language acquisition.

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Data availability

The Chroma corpus is openly available in the CHILDES database (https://childes.talkbank.org/) and in the LINDAT database (https://lindat.cz/) in several versions.

Code availability

The MorphoDiTa software used for the morphological tagging is a free software available at https://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/morphodita. The custom Python script written by JS is available at https://github.com/slamajak/The-Chroma-corpus.git.

Notes

  1. Information on available MOR grammars is given on the web page of the project TalkBank, which provides various data repositories (including child language banks) as well as CHAT, CLAN, and MOR manuals. Specifically, see https://talkbank.org/morgrams/.

  2. Available at http://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/services/morphodita/.

  3. See https://github.com/ufal/morphodita.

  4. See https://www.korpus.cz/.

  5. The dictionary, published by the Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, is available at https://slovnikcestiny.cz/, and its dictionary-making principles were published in the monograph edited by Kochová and Opavská (2016). Entries starting with a- to f- have already been published, and entries starting with h- to j- are at different stages of revisions and editing. One of the co-authors of this paper is a co-author of the dictionary, which granted us access to unpublished entries as well and helped us ensure that the POS-classification in the corpus is in accordance with the most widely accepted POS treatment of moot words in the Czech linguistic tradition.

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Acknowledgements

The creation of the Chroma corpus has been supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic, projects No. LM2018101 and LM2023062 (LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ). The morphological annotation of the corpus has been supported by the funding program Grant Schemes at Charles University (CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/19_073/0016935). We are grateful to the following students who participated in the transcription of recordings, the revision of transcripts, and the manual control of the automatic morphological annotation (in alphabetical order): Markéta Baslová, Kateřina Bělehrádková, Tereza Binderová, Barbora Blahnová, Iurii Bochkov, Jan Henyš, Alžběta Macháčková, Anna Marklová, Martin Pavlíček, Jan Pinc, Tereza Šátavová, Denisa Šebestová, Jana Segi Lukavská, Kateřina Šimková, Leona Straková, Tomáš Treichel, Štěpánka Tvrdíková, and Martina Vokáčová. We also thank our collaborator Petra Čechová who participated in the process of morphological annotation, and our mentor, Filip Smolík, whose contribution to the entire project has been invaluable.

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (Grants No. LM2018101 and LM2023062 LINDAT/CLARIAH-CZ) and by the funding program Grant Schemes at Charles University (CZ.02.2.69/0.0/0.0/19_073/0016935).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Anna Chromá, Jakub Sláma, Klára Matiasovitsová & Jolana Treichelová

  2. Czech Language Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic

    Jakub Sláma

Authors
  1. Anna Chromá
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  2. Jakub Sláma
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  3. Klára Matiasovitsová
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  4. Jolana Treichelová
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Contributions

Conceptualization and supervision [AC, KM]; project administration [AC, KM, JT]; data curation [AC, KM, JT]; methodology [KM, JS]; software [JS]; formal analysis [KM, JS, AC]; writing the original draft [AC, JS]; writing—review and editing [AC, JS, KM, JT].

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Correspondence to Anna Chromá.

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The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

Ethical approval

The approval of the Research Ethics Committee of Charles University was gained in 2018 under No. 2018UKFF01620.

Informed consent

For each participating child, both parents as well as other participating caregivers gave a written informed consent for the use and publication of their anonymized data.

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Chromá, A., Sláma, J., Matiasovitsová, K. et al. A morphologically annotated longitudinal corpus of spoken Czech child–adult interactions. Lang Resources & Evaluation (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-023-09710-y

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