Materials - Data Selection

Utterances of 16 mothers directed to their infants (< one year) were included:

  • Eight mothers from the CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000); a subset was selected so that there was a more balanced number of Intonational Phrases (IPs) from each mother (see Zahner, Pohl & Braun 2015) (henceforth, CHILDES subset).
     
  • Seven mothers recorded at the Baby Speech Lab (BSL) at the University of Konstanz and one mother recorded in a home-environment (henceforth, BSL subset).

Recordings of mother-infant dyads (in both subsets) took place in natural play situations.

In total, the KIDS Corpus comprises 10min 12sec of speech, 2014 words (513 word forms, counting all inflected forms of a word as a separate type), 524 IPs, 832 pitch accents.

Table 1 shows more detailed information on each mother.

Table 1: Information on data, split by mothers.