Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on CHILDES

[Gordon, Peter]

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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