Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on CHILDES

[Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

Just got back from being with my six grandchildren, three of whom
were visiting from the UK their cousins who live in Manhatten.
Here's a gem for you!

5 year old:  "let's play baddles"
4 year old: "it's not baddles, it's battles. Battles doesn't rhyme
with paddles""!

hope you're well
best
Annette


At 12:06 pm -0400 30/7/04, Gordon, Peter wrote:
>Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on CHILDES
>
>Many of us in the child language community are parents, but we don't
>have the time or organization to collect large language samples from
>our kids.  However, probably most of us have kept a notebook handy
>to record interesting things that our kids say.  Sometimes they just
>never get used because it's not really enough to publish and might
>end up being only an anecdote in our classes.  It seems to me that
>this is a rich source of unsystematic but theoretically relevant
>data.  It's the kind of data that will only show up fortuitously in
>the more systematic data collections but because we as child
>language researchers are trained to know when something is
>remarkable, we can identify such utterances easily and jot them
>down.  Think of all of the rich examples that have become available,
>for example, from Melissa Bowerman with these kinds of data.
>
>I would suggest that we develop a format for distributing these gems
>-- perhaps the same basic CHAT format in little mini files--  and
>have a folder in which these can be reside on CHILDES.  Perhaps we
>could include key words that would help to identify the kind of
>error that the child made.  This would not substitute for true
>quantitative data, but it might be useful for answering questions,
>for example,  about whether or not kids ever make errors of certain
>types.  Such errors may never show up in the systematic speech
>samples but nevertheless could be found within the broader language
>output of the child.  Perhaps we could start off by seeing how many
>of us have these scrappy notebooks lying around waiting to be mined.
>Perhaps if there were a public place to deposit such data, this
>might encourage people to do this more.
>
>
>Peter Gordon
>
>
>Peter Gordon, Associate Professor
>525 W 120th St. Box 180
>Biobehavioral Sciences Department
>Teachers College, Columbia University
>New York, NY 10027
>
>(212)  678-8162
>
>
>
>
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