Readers 读者
Exploring individual differences and contextual variations in child language corpora
探索兒童語料庫中的個別差異與語境變異
Hintat Cheung 張顯達; Jing-chen Yang 楊靜琛
Abstract 摘要
Corpora are usually built to serve specific purposes. Child language corpora are constructed mainly for examining the course of development of a target group of children. As in other developmental studies, individual differences are commonly found. Individual differences can lead to growth curves of different slopes and unexpected plateaus. These inherent variations raise the question of how representativeness of a child language corpus can be determined. To this end, the present study examined the range of variations that are inherent to contextual variations. Child language samples archived in Taiwan Corpus of Child Mandarin (TCCM, http://taiccm.org/) were analyzed. Two types of language samples were compared: spontaneous conversational samples and narratives elicited in experimental settings. D, an index of lexical diversity in child language samples, as well as several other indices on language development were computed. Our findings suggested that conversational samples and narrative samples are quite different in their capacities in gauging linguistic development. D showed sensitivity to the early stages of language development in typically developing children while Verb Type showed age effect in children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI).
Keywords 關鍵詞
Child language corpora 兒童語料庫 Individual differences 個別差異 Contextual variations 語境變異 Language development 語言發展