CEPLEXicon ― A Lexicon of Child European Portuguese

CEPLEXicon A Lexicon of Child European Portuguese Ana Lúcia Santos, Maria João Freitas, Aida Cardoso Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa / CLUL Universidade de Lisboa Alameda da Universidade, 1600-214 Lisboa E-mail: als@letras.ulisboa.pt, joaofreitas@letras.ulisboa.pt, aidacard@gmail.com Abstract CEPLEXicon (version 1.1) is a child lexicon resulting from the automatic tagging of two child corpora: the corpus Santos (Santos, 2006; Santos et al. 2014) and the corpus Child – Adult Interaction (Freitas et al. 2012), which integrates information from the corpus Freitas (Freitas, 1997). This lexicon includes spontaneous speech produced by seven children (1;02.00 to 3;11.12) during approximately 86h of child-adult interaction. The automatic tagging comprised the lemmatization and morphosyntactic classification of the speech produced by the seven children included in the two child corpora; the lexicon contains information pertaining to lemmas and syntactic categories as well as absolute number of occurrences and frequencies in three age intervals: < 2 years; ≥ 2 years and < 3 years; ≥ 3 years. The information included in this lexicon and the format in which it is presented enables research in different areas and allows researchers to obtain measures of lexical growth. CEPLEXicon is available through the ELRA catalogue. Keywords: acquisition, lexicon, European Portuguese 1. Introduction In this paper, we present a new lexicon for European Portuguese, representative of the lexicon of children aged 1;02 to 3;111: CEPLEXicon. This lexicon contains 2 201 lemmas, which were based on the automatic tagging of 98 200 words. It is already registered (ISLRN: 408-817-203-152-3, ELRA ID: ELRA-L0094) and available through the ELRA catalogue2. The main goal of this work is to provide lexical information about child speech produced in a naturalistic setting. This child lexicon was built from a set of longitudinal data collected in the 1990s by researchers of the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa, namely the Santos corpus (Santos, 2006; Santos et al., 2014) and the corpus Child – Adult Interaction (Freitas et al., 2012). Longitudinal data is an important source of information about the development of language in L1 acquisition. Hence, corpora built from longitudinal data, as the two corpora previously mentioned, play an important role in the evaluation of the acquisition process, since they help determining stages in linguistic development and they contribute to the study of the emergence and stabilization of specific linguistic structures. Hence, CEPLEXicon was built taking into account the contribution of longitudinal data towards a better understanding of lexical development and the importance of making available more information about the acquisition of the lexicon in an accessible format. Since many of the corpora available through formats such as CHILDES and PHONBANK are heavily coded (with phonetic, syntactic, morphological information), our goal 1 We use the following convention to indicate children’s age: yy;mm.day 2 http://catalog.elra.info/product_info.php?products_id=1244. was to offer the community a resource that compiles the lexical information contained in two different corpora and to present this information in a format that enables research in different areas, such as linguistics, speech therapy, education, among others. 2. Building the Lexicon In …

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