Virtual Center for Language Acquisition (VCLA)

research group

description

The CLAL/VCLA holds 271 original audio recordings of about 450 children acquiring Sinhala in Sri Lanka, between the ages of 2.00.9 and 6.10.21 (years, months, days). The audio recordings involve natural speech samples from a subset of these children and production data collected from 4 experiments designed to test the development of complex syntax, using an elicited imitation method with each of 4 experimental designs. The designs targeted: acquisition of coordinate structures, of various types of adverbial subordinate clause structures, and of pronominal and null anaphora. A central database providing essential metadata on each child subject is linked to the audio files. Transcripts are currently being scanned as PDFs in conjunction with each audio file. For three of the experiments, comprehension data (in the form of an act out task) was also collected. Through a gift from the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, these audio tapes have been digitized to computer records and transcript scanning is proceeding. You can find more information at this link.  Currently, there are 331 datasets representing Sinhala subjects within DataStaR, with each dataset containing a subset of the original metadata collected for the subject.