The Odense Frog-Story Corpus


The Odense Frog-Story Corpus is one of the core components of the project. The corpus is intended both to substantially increase the available acquisition corpora for the Danish language, and to facilitate the testing of hypotheses relating to inter-individual differences regarding development of narrative skills, as well as studying the relationship between spoken and written language. Furthermore, the corpus is intended to be used for studies regarding other aspects of language acquisition, such as morphology, gender and regional variety.

The Odense Frog-Story Corpus is an instrumentational study, using the children's book Frog, Where Are You, by Mercer Mayer, 1969. This format has been chosen in order to facilitate cross-linguistic comparative studies, as this book forms the basis for a number of cross-linguistic narrative studies (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Bamberg, 1987).

 

Facts about the corpus

* The Odense Frog-Story Corpus is a cross-sectional study of randomly selected Danish–
   speaking children ranging from age 4 to 16 as well as adults.
* The instrument used is Mercer Mayer's 1969 Frog, Where Are You?
* The collection of data began in May 1999
* Both spoken and written narratives are collected.
* Spoken narratives are audio- and video-recorded
* Both audio- and video-recordings are digital (using DAT-recorder and digital video
   camera respectively).
* Recordings are transcribed and coded using the CHILDES system (The Child
   Language Data Exchange System).
* It is the intention that the transcripts, linked to the digitalized audio files, will be made
   publicly accessible via the internet.
* The Frog-Story corpus is used as data in the sub-projects, see also Speaking and
   Writing.