A Multimedia Corpus of Child Mandarin: The Tong Corpus

This article features a new multimedia corpus with 22 hours of recordings of a Mandarin-speaking child from the age of 1;7 to 3;4. We review the state of the art in the use of corpora for first language acquisition of Mandarin, and highlight the importance of corpus studies in evaluating children's language developmental patterns vis-a-vis adult input. The transcripts in our new corpus are annotated with a morphological tier indicating parts of speech, and linked to audio or video files. This corpus goes beyond existing published corpora of child Mandarin in having more data for a single child, as well as media linking. It contributes to a number of fields including language acquisition, Chinese linguistics, corpus linguistics, developmental psycholinguistics, education, and speech and language therapy.