CHILDES Mandarin BJCMC Corpus

(1) The BJCMC Corpus) The Beijing Child Mandarin Corpus (BJCMC) was constructed to address the absence of systematic documentation of child Mandarin speech in naturalistic contexts at preschool age (3-6 years), and to serve as a monolingual baseline for the Child Heritage Chinese Corpus (CHCC) and the Hong Kong Mandarin-English Child Corpus (HKMECC). Participants (n = 48) were recruited in Beijing, China in 2023, mainly from the Haidian (n = 31) and Chaoyang Districts (n = 9). An effort was made to recruit children from families with mid-high socioeconomic status (SES), which was indexed through the mother’s education level. The children included in the current corpus were raised in Mandarin-dominant households and educated in mainstream Mandarin-medium schools in Beijing; they had not received direct and substantial exposure in other languages (for example, English) or Chinese varieties other than Mandarin at the time of participation. All participants were healthy without suspected or diagnosed language disorders. (2) Dataset Usage Instructions: Unzip the Folder: Extract the downloaded .zip file using your computer's built-in extractor or a tool like 7-Zip/WinZip.  Open .CHA Files: The extracted .CHA files require specialized software. They can only be opened, viewed, and analyzed using the free CLAN program from TalkBank. Download CLAN here: https://talkbank.org/software/clan/