Database of the Welsh
    of Children 3-7 Years of Age

    Background

    Two projects are responsible for this database.

    Economic and Social Research Council Project 1999-2000

    This electronic version is the direct result of a project, The Aberystwyth Child Language Databases which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (R000237978) with a grant of £60,611. The project was located in the Department of Education, University of Wales Aberystwyth, and ran for 12 months from 1st July 1999 until the 30th June 2000.

    The director of this project was Bob Morris Jones, and the recordings were transcribed in CHILDES format by Merris Griffiths and Mared Roberts, Research Officers.

    Because of dialectal differences, it was advantageous to have one researcher from a northern dialect area and the other from a southern dialect area.

    This project had the following objectives, all of which have been achieved and are described elsewhere in these pages:

    • to create an electronic database in CHILDES format of the audio recordings of children between three and seven years of age who spoke Welsh
    • to prepare a lexicon of the wordforms which occur in the database
    • to locate the database in the CHILDES Web site so that it would be available as a resource for interested academic researchers
    • to prepare Web pages further advertising the database.

    Then the data and the lexicon would be publically available at the CHILDES site for work in:

    • the sentence-grammar and discourse of children's language
    • and computing programs would be available at CHILDES to aid these analyses.

    Because of the regularity of the CHILDES transcriptional system, howevever, researchers would also be free to write their own computer programs for their own aims. A programming language such as Icon is suitable for this purpose.

    Welsh Office Project 1974-1977

    The audio recordings were originally collected, with the permission of the parents, the schools, and the Local Education Authority, as part of a project which was funded by the Welsh Office, Concept and Language Development, under the direction of Professor CJ Dodson between 1974 ac 1977. This project was administered by Bob Morris Jones, and staffed at different times by Brec'hed Piette, Hefin Jones, John Jones, Wyn James, Christine James, and Nesta Dodson.

    Brech'ed Piette was mainly responsible for designing concept tests which were adminstered to many of the children who were recorded. The results have been coded on to plain text computer files at the University of Wales Aberystwyth.

    A questionnaire was distributed through the schools to the parents which asked for details about the backgrounds of the children.

    The background details overall included information about:

    • sex of the children
    • socio-economic background of the parents
    • educational background of the parents
    • language background of the parents
    • language use of the children
    • language of the school