Words of the World's Children Collection

Includes tapes and records concerning language development in children.

This collection includes research data and related materials from almost 40 years of study of language acquisition created by the Cornell Language Acquisition Lab and by the international Virtual Center for Language Acquisition https://testvcla.cac.cornell.edu. Research data collected across the world from numerous languages are included: English, Sinhala, Japanese, Chinese (Mandarin), Hindi, and Arabic are reflected each through a series of experimental and naturalistic studies with children, aged 2 to 8 years of age, eliciting speech production and comprehension. Subsequent research included: Spanish, Korean, German, Dutch, Tulu, Inuktitut, French, Tamil, and Malayalam. Additional data involving multilingual language acquisition include: Basque-Spanish, Hebrew-English, Korean-English bilingual child data, as well as adult second language (English) study including Indonesian, Italian and Chinese and contrastive study of Spanish and Japanese acquisition of English.

Much of these language data derive from comparable experimental designs allowing unique comparability across languages across the developmental course of language acquisition, with children grouped by age. Research data includes audio files as well as metadata on each subject, transcripts and translations across languages, supplemented by lab records on experimental methods in each study allowing replication studies. Multilingual child acquisition data are supported by video recordings for several longitudinal case studies.

Research data and materials are supplemented by archived course materials to support survey of the field of language acquisition, and of multilingualism acquisition, and for teaching lab methods for the study of language acquisition. (HD/COGSt/Ling/Psych 436, 437, 437, 450 4710). Course materials include video modules introducing methods for eliciting language production and comprehension data from children under scientific research methods. They exemplify several published experimental studies resulting from such methods.

In addition, collection materials include course materials for courses in the study of the Cognitive Psychologist , Jean Piaget, and the ‘Growth of the Mind’ (234, 334, 434).