2021 Corpus Roundtable

Child Directed Print Corpora: Understanding the Resource

Virtual Roundtable

30th June, 1st July, 2nd July 2021

About the roundtable

The TalkTogether team hosted a 3-day virtual round table event which aimed to understand the promise of child-directed print corpora for child language assessment, experimental research, and the development of children’s materials. It also aimed to understand how corpora can support theorizing on child language acquisition. The roundtable catered to a broad audience and aimed to consider the usefulness of corpora for researchers, practitioners and their trainers, and curriculum developers.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/videoseries?list=PLODT6q8rLrJftQ8Ih4xD-rsB5pvXTUHr_

Why a roundtable?

Print Corpora are useful resources for the study of children’s encounters with language in books. The roundtable brought together researchers to discuss how best to examine the print that is likely to shape children’s language learning.

Print Corpora are used in empirical studies on, for example, the properties of words and sentences and their effects on language and literacy development. Print Corpora may help inform language assessment and language programmes. 

The Round Table examined these uses of Print Corpora, and also how language in books was unique and different from spoken language.

Impact of the roundtable

The event brought together a diverse set of researchers from the fields of psychology, education, linguistics, and speech-language pathology, who each had created or utilized print and audio corpora in Filipino, Kannada and other Indic languages, English, and Malay, and had introduced their work to fellow academics, teachers, NGO workers, curriculum developers, and government officials.

The event was a significant knowledge exchange activity among participants, who had been exposed to research methods, topics, and languages within and outside of their niche.

TalkTogether at the roundtable

For the TalkTogether team, the roundtable was a major showcase of work conducted over 2020-21 on the development of:

• Kannada and Filipino print corpora,
• a book levelling protocol,
• an analysis of the morphological properties of the two languages including affixes,
• a collection of age-of-acquisition ratings in the two languages,
• an audio corpus of oral heritage materials in Kannada & other Indic languages, and
• a text complexity framework

Participants expressed considerable interest in the public resources that the TalkTogether team will release for Kannada and Filipino. We hope to share those with you soon.