Children Online: A survey of child language and CMC corpora

The collection of representative corpus samples of both child language and online (CMC) language varieties is crucial for linguistic research that is motivated by applications to the protection of children online. In this paper, we present an extensive survey of corpora available for these two areas. Although a significant amount of research has been undertaken both on child language and on CMC language varieties, a much smaller number of datasets are made available as corpora. Especially lacking are corpora which match requirements for verifiable age and gender metadata, although some include self-reported information, which may be unreliable. Our survey highlights the lack of corpus data available for the intersecting area of child language in CMC environments. This lack of available corpus data is a significant drawback for those wishing to undertake replicable studies of child language and online language varieties.