The CHILDES System

Child language research thrives on naturalistic data—data collected from spontaneous interactions in naturally occurring situations. However, the process of collecting, transcribing, and analyzing naturalistic data is extremely time-consuming and often quite unreliable. To improve this process, the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) has developed tools that facilitate the sharing of transcript data, increase the reliability of transcription, and automate the process of data analysis. These new tools, described in detail in MacWhinney (1995), are bringing about significant changes in the way research is conducted in the field of child language. This chapter reviews the background to the formation of the CHILDES system, the shape of the basic CHILDES tools, and the relation of particular tools to particular research goals. It concludes with a presentation of extensions to the system that will be developed during the coming decade.

[1]  E. Zurif,et al.  The effects of focal brain damage on pragmatic expression. , 1983, Canadian journal of psychology.

[2]  S. Pinker,et al.  On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition , 1988, Cognition.

[3]  R. Taraban,et al.  Language learning: Cues or rules? , 1989 .

[4]  T. Achenbach.  The Child Behavior Profile: I. Boys aged 6--11. , 1978, Journal of consulting and clinical psychology.

[5]  Noam Chomsky,et al.  वाक्यविन्यास का सैद्धान्तिक पक्ष = Aspects of the theory of syntax , 1965 .

[6]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  The Child Language Data Exchange System: an update , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[7]  M. C. Caselli,et al.  The acquisition of Italian morphology: implications for models of language development , 1992, Journal of Child Language.

[8]  H. Scarborough.  Index of Productive Syntax , 1990, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[9]  R. Weir,et al.  Language in the crib , 1962 .

[10]  D. P. Hayes.  Speaking and writing: Distinct patterns of word choice , 1988 .

[11]  Paul Fletcher,et al.  The grammatical analysis of language disability , 1976 .

[12]  B. MacWhinney.  The CHILDES project: tools for analyzing talk , 1992 .

[13]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  Implementations are not conceptualizations: Revising the verb learning model , 1991, Cognition.

[14]  L. Bloom.  Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars , 1970 .

[15]  Ernst L. Moerk,et al.  The Mother Of Eve: As A First Language Teacher , 1984 .

[16]  H. Bauer,et al.  Speech and language production at age 2: evidence for tradeoffs between linguistic and phonetic processing. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[17]  J. Connolly.  Book reviews : The grammatical analysis of language disability, second edition , 1989 .

[18]  Nina Hyams,et al.  Language Acquisition and the Theory of Parameters , 1986 .

[19]  D. Slobin.  Crosslinguistic Evidence for the Language-making Capacity , 1985 .

[20]  C Snow,et al.  Child language data exchange system , 1984, Journal of Child Language.

[21]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing. , 1992 .

[22]  P. A. Villiers,et al.  A cross-sectional study of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes in child speech , 1973, Journal of psycholinguistic research.

[23]  Jane A. Noll,et al.  Book Notice of J. L. Sokolov and C. E. Snow’s (Eds.) Handbook of research in language development using CHILDES , 1997 .

[24]  M. Braine.  Children's First Word Combinations. , 1976 .

[25]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  Language Development , 2015 .

[26]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  Sentential devices for conveying givenness and newness: A cross-cultural developmental study , 1978 .

[27]  P Tallal,et al.  Selection of children with specific language deficits. , 1981, The Journal of speech and hearing disorders.

[28]  J. Reznick,et al.  The validity of a parent report instrument of child language at twenty months , 1989, Journal of Child Language.

[29]  Margaret Lahey,et al.  Language disorders and language development , 1988 .

[30]  Michael Halliday,et al.  Cohesion in English , 1976 .

[31]  Jon F. Miller,et al.  Assessing Language Production in Children: Experimental Procedures , 1981 .

[32]  M. Rutter.  Diagnosis and Definition , 1978 .

[33]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[34]  C. Darwin,et al.  I.—A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AN INFANT , 1877 .

[35]  C. Snow,et al.  Classifying communicative acts in children's interactions. , 1994, Journal of communication disorders.

[36]  Andrew Mackie,et al.  For Henry Kučera : studies in Slavic philology and computational linguistics , 1998 .

[37]  David Crystal,et al.  Profiling Linguistic Disability , 1982 .

[38]  Virginia Valian.  Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children , 1991, Cognition.

[39]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  Childes/Bib: An Annotated Bibliography of Child Language and Language Disorders , 1991 .

[40]  Helen Tager-Flusberg,et al.  The relation of utterance length to grammatical complexity in normal and language-disordered groups , 1991, Applied Psycholinguistics.

[41]  F. Antinucci,et al.  How children talk about what happened , 1976, Journal of Child Language.

[42]  Harold R. Bauer,et al.  The ethologic model of phonetic development: I. Phonetic contrast estimators , 1988 .

[43]  R. Chapman,et al.  Semantic roles and residual grammatical categories in mother and child speech: who tunes into whom? , 1981, Journal of Child Language.

[44]  K. Plunkett,et al.  Connectionism and developmental theory , 1992 .

[45]  P. Dale,et al.  The validity of a parent report measure of vocabulary and syntax at 24 months. , 1991, Journal of speech and hearing research.

[46]  D. Bickerton.  The language bioprogram hypothesis , 1984, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[47]  M. C. Templin.  Certain language skills in children , 1957 .

[48]  R. Weist,et al.  The defective tense hypothesis: on the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish , 1984, Journal of Child Language.