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

语言、思想和文化是错综复杂地联系在一起的，但这种关系在一个人的一生中是如何发挥作用的，尤其是双语者，还没有得到很好的理解。双语者在美国和世界各地的人口中占很大一部分。本项目对俄罗斯移民社区中双语者的语言进行研究，以更好地了解语言知识的基本属性、语言习得和维持、语言变异和变化的本质以及母语者知识的稳定性。研究移民的语言也很重要，因为它将有助于建立对这些经常被污名化的语言实践的理解和尊重。在该项目中创建的大型、开放的双语和单语俄语演讲数据库将使教育政策制定者和从业者能够对美国学校的双语儿童做出适当的决定，并为传统的俄语使用者创造教育资源，他们是国家宝贵的语言资源。最终，该数据库还可以帮助俄语的自然语言处理应用程序，例如增加跨文化在线交流的机会，并通过摘要和机器翻译使新的和较少可用的出版物快速访问。该项目将建立一个开放获取的在线数据库，记录两类双语者的语言：美国和德国讲俄语的家庭中的成年和双语儿童，以及俄罗斯有小孩的单语家庭的对照组。这是首个同类数据库，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。它将包含与音频对齐的文本，并将对形态学（例如，“阴性名词”）和句法（例如，“关系从句”）进行注释，这将使研究人员能够研究父母和孩子讲话中结构的频率。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主流语言和文化的影响；不完全学习或忘记母语；或者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.