Parsed and Audio-Aligned Corpus of Bilingual Russian Child Speech (BiRCh)

语言，思想和文化是错综复杂的联系，但这种关系在一个人的一生中发挥作用的方式，特别是一个双语的人，还没有得到很好的理解。 双语者占美国人口和世界人口的很大一部分。该项目研究俄罗斯移民社区双语者的语言，以更好地了解语言知识的基本属性，语言习得和保持，语言变异和变化的性质，以及母语知识的稳定性。 学习移民的语言也很重要，因为这将有助于理解和尊重这些经常被污名化的语言习俗。在该项目期间创建的双语和单语俄语大型开放式数据库将使教育政策制定者和从业人员能够就美国学校的双语儿童做出适当的决定，并为俄语传统发言者创建教育资源，他们是该国的宝贵语言资源。最终，该数据库还可以为俄语的自然语言处理应用提供帮助，例如增加在线跨文化交流的机会，以及通过摘要和机器翻译快速访问新的和较难获得的出版物。该项目将构建一个开放访问的在线数据库，记录两种双语者的语音：在美国和德国的俄语家庭中的移民成年人和双语幼儿，以及在俄罗斯有幼儿的单语家庭的对照组。 这是第一个此类数据库，将作为一种工具，用于比较不同人群和不同时间的语言行为，调查语法，词汇和社会语言学变量之间的相关性。它将包含音频对齐的转录本，并将对形态进行注释（例如，“阴性名词”）和句法（例如，“关系从句”），这将使研究人员能够研究父母和儿童的言语中的结构频率。 该数据库将使研究人员能够梳理出双语儿童和成人的母语与单语者的语言之间差异的几个可能原因：语言变化的正常过程或多数语言和文化的影响;母语的不完全学习或遗忘;或普遍的认知和语言原则。

Language, thought, and culture are intricately connected, but the way this relationship plays out over the lifespan of an individual, especially a bilingual person, is not well understood.  Bilinguals constitute a large portion of the US population and around the world. This project researches the language of bilingual speakers in Russian immigrant communities to gain a better understanding of fundamental properties of linguistic knowledge, language acquisition and maintenance, the nature of language variation and change, and stability of native speaker knowledge. Studying the language of immigrants is also important, because it will help build understanding and respect for these often stigmatized linguistic practices. The large, open-access database of bilingual and monolingual Russian speech created during the project will allow education policy makers and practitioners to make appropriate decisions concerning bilingual children in American schools and to create educational resources for heritage speakers of Russian who are an invaluable language resource for the country. Ultimately, this database can also help natural language processing applications for Russian, such as enhancing opportunities for cross-cultural communication online, and making new and less available publications quickly accessible through summarization and machine translation.The project will construct an open-access online database documenting the speech of two types of bilinguals: émigré adults and young bilingual children in Russian-speaking families in the US and Germany, with a control group of monolingual families with small children in Russia. This first-of-its-kind database will serve as a tool for comparing linguistic behavior across populations and over time, investigating correlations between grammatical, lexical, and sociolinguistic variables. It will contain audio-aligned transcripts and will be annotated for morphology (e.g., "feminine noun") and syntax (e.g., "relative clause"), which will allow researchers to study frequencies of constructions in both the parents' and children's speech. The database will enable researchers to tease apart several possible causes of the differences between the home language of bilingual children and adults, and the speech of monolinguals: normal processes of language change or the influence of the majority language and culture; incomplete learning or forgetting of the home language; or universal cognitive and linguistic principles.