ChiSCor: A Corpus of Freely Told Fantasy Stories by Dutch Children for
  Computational Linguistics and Cognitive Science
Bram M. A. van Dijk Max J. van Duijn Suzan Verberne Marco R. Spruit
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.