Welsh Acquisition Database Background

This electronic version is the direct result of a project, The Acquisition of Welsh Syntax which was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (R000236420) with a grant of £45,590.

The project was based in the Department of Education, of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and also in the Department of Linguistics of the University of Wales Aberystwyth, and ran from 1st January 1996 until the 31st December 1996.

It was jointly directed by Professor Robert D. Borsley and Dr Michelle Aldridge of the Department of Linguistics, UWB, and Mr Bob Morris Jones of the Department of Education, UWA.

Two Research Officers were responsible for recording and transcribing the data: Ms Susan Clack in Bangor, and Ms Gwenan in Aberystwyth.

The main aim of the project was to produce a database for the study of the acquisition of Welsh syntax. This involved:

• making audio-recordings of spontaneous conversations between a young child and a researcher and / or family members;
• transcribing the audio-recordings;
• creating an electronic database of the transcriptions in CHILDES format;
• preparing a lexicon of the wordforms which occur in the database;
• locating the database at the CHILDES Web site so that it would be available as a resource for interested academic researchers.