ChiSCor: A Corpus of Freely Told Fantasy Stories by Dutch Children for Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science
This provides an ecologically valid dataset for computational linguistics and cognitive science researchers studying children's language development and narrative structure.
The authors released ChiSCor, a corpus of 619 freely told fantasy stories by 442 Dutch children aged 4-12, and demonstrated its utility through case studies showing stable syntactic complexity across ages, adherence to Zipf's law, and the ability to train informative lemma vectors.
In this resource paper we release ChiSCor, a new corpus containing 619 fantasy stories, told freely by 442 Dutch children aged 4-12. ChiSCor was compiled for studying how children render character perspectives, and unravelling language and cognition in development, with computational tools. Unlike existing resources, ChiSCor's stories were produced in natural contexts, in line with recent calls for more ecologically valid datasets. ChiSCor hosts text, audio, and annotations for character complexity and linguistic complexity. Additional metadata (e.g. education of caregivers) is available for one third of the Dutch children. ChiSCor also includes a small set of 62 English stories. This paper details how ChiSCor was compiled and shows its potential for future work with three brief case studies: i) we show that the syntactic complexity of stories is strikingly stable across children's ages; ii) we extend work on Zipfian distributions in free speech and show that ChiSCor obeys Zipf's law closely, reflecting its social context; iii) we show that even though ChiSCor is relatively small, the corpus is rich enough to train informative lemma vectors that allow us to analyse children's language use. We end with a reflection on the value of narrative datasets in computational linguistics.