Pear Film World Corpus

A six-minute film that was produced at the University of California at Berkeley in 1975 and shown to speakers of a number of languages, who were asked to tell what happened in it. In the meantime it has been used in a variety of other studies across other languages. The goal has been to present cinematically a series of more or less natural events to multiple viewers, who are then asked to verbalize what they remember. See Wallace Chafe (ed.), The Pear Stories: Cognitive, Cultural, and Linguistic Aspects of Narrative Production. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex (1980).