Corpus linguistics is characterized by the analysis of large transcription sets of actual speech; the Taipei Corpus is one of the largest sets available for any language.  The Corpus consists of 64 hours of transcribed speech from Mandarin-speaking two-year-olds, taped in Taipei, 1975-1980.  Collected by Professor Mary Erbaugh the transcripts total  almost 10,000 handwritten pages and are a unique resource with detailed contextual notes such as children's gestures and activities.

The collection is focused on four Taipei children aged 1 year 10 months to 2 years 10 months, whose speech was recorded every other week, two of them for a year.

SELECTED REFERENCES:

CHILDES (The Child Language Data Exchange)
Mary S. Erbaugh.  2001.  The Pear Stories:  Narrative in 7 Chinese Dialects
Mary S. Erbaugh, 1992.  "The Acquisition of Mandarin" in Dan I. Slobin, ed.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, volume 3.  Hillsdale, NJ:  Larence Erbaum.  373-455.

 CHILD BIOGRAPHIES:

 AUDIO EXAMPLES (MP3 files):