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American Journal of Philological Sciences

Peer Reviewed | Open Access | E-ISSN: 2771-2273
Published Article

Methodological Foundations for Modeling A Longitudinal Corpus of Uzbek Child Language Within the Childes/Talkbank Infrastructure and Multi-Tier Linguistic Annotation

Methodological Foundations for Modeling A Longitudinal Corpus of Uzbek Child Language Within the Childes/Talkbank Infrastructure and Multi-Tier Linguistic Annotation

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37547/ajps/Volume06Issue03-55

Keywords:

Child language acquisition language ontogeny longitudinal corpus

Abstract

This article establishes a comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework for designing, constructing, and curating a longitudinal corpus of spontaneous Uzbek child speech within the international CHILDES/TalkBank infrastructure, supported by multi-tier linguistic annotation. Although empirical inquiries into Uzbek developmental linguistics have addressed sociolinguistic, lexical-semantic, pragmatic, and preliminary audio-corpus dimensions, the global CHILDES repository as of 2026 lacks a dedicated, standardized longitudinal dataset for Uzbek. The primary objective of this study is to substantiate the typological, computational, and developmental necessity of creating such a resource and to delineate its core architectural and methodological principles.

Employing a conceptual-analytical approach, this study investigates the operationalization of the CHILDES/TalkBank ecosystem, the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Talk) transcription standard, CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis) computational modules, Universal Dependencies (UD)-compliant morphosyntactic representation, and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) open-data management principles as applied to spontaneous Uzbek child language. A comparative analysis incorporates the Russian longitudinal RusLan-M corpus, the Kazakh Balausa1 corpus, Turkish CHILDES historical datasets, and the modern Uzbek Universal Dependencies treebank.

The analysis formulates five indispensable pillars for constructing the corpus: (1) systematic repeated sampling over extended developmental windows; (2) high-fidelity naturalistic audiovisual recording; (3) standardized CHAT-compliant transcription; (4) a hybrid morphosyntactic annotation scheme adapted to the agglutinative structure of Uzbek; and (5) rigorous research ethics, bioethical anonymization protocols, and comprehensive metadata profiling. Establishing this standardized longitudinal corpus provides the indispensable empirical infrastructure required to systematically track individual developmental trajectories, the acquisition of inflectional categories, and cross-linguistic developmental dynamics, thereby integrating Uzbek developmental linguistics into global corpus-based scholarship.

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