Audiovisual Corpus of Shipibo-Konibo language acquisition

Research into the acquisition or development of human language has made significant progress in recent decades. However, how children implement interaction mechanisms in their natural communication environment and social habitat remains poorly understood, mainly because the field lacks carefully controlled quantitative analyses carried out on sufficiently large longitudinal datasets. This project aims to create a corpus of child speech and speech directed at children in Shipibo-Konibo, with the goal of investigating how they learn their language, which exhibits grammatical features quite distinct from Spanish and other European languages. This research is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of the origins of language because, as in other areas of evolutionary research, the key to comparison lies not only in the final state of adulthood but also in the acquisitive path that leads to that state. For the study of human language acquisition, we have recruited a number of families interested in participating in a pilot study of naturalistic recordings. Funded by the University of Zurich. Research Areas: Experimental Psycholinguistics.