pitch shifts

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,

    Over the last four years, we have been attempting to provide  
continually better support in CHAT and CLAN for transcribers who are  
familiar with Conversation Analysis (CA) transcription format.  At  
first, we simply provided a few CA symbols inside the CLAN editor  
without fully  integrating CA and CHAT modes.  Then, we began to  
provide methods for automatic alignment of overlaps and fuller  
support for all the special CA characters.  Later, we eliminated any  
overt distinction between CA and CHAT by allowing full access to all  
CA characters from basic CHAT mode.  The various CA characters and  
forms we support can be found at http://talkbank.org/ca/
    Some of these changes have imposed unacceptable restrictions on  
CA coding in order to allow us to use CLAN programs like CHECK, FREQ,  
etc.  However, we have also been developing a program called CHAT2CA  
that automatically removes all these ugly CHAT restrictions and  
allows CA users to redisplay their files in a purer CA format.
    The other side of this work involves a slow adaptation of CHAT  
conventions to look more like CA conventions wherever that makes good  
sense.  The first major change in this direction is, as I have  
mentioned, the fact that all the codes given at http://talkbank.org/ 
ca/codes.html are currently legal in CHAT and should pass CHECK.   
These codes mark things like pitch shift, height, tempo change,  
creaky voice, breath, and loudness.   These features were not marked  
in the current CHAT transcripts, so there was no need to reformat the  
transcripts to use these codes.  However, they are now available for  
future work.
     In addition, I have now replaced the earlier system of CHAT  
markings for prosodic shift (shift to high, shift to low) with the  
corresponding CA forms.  This means that -' was changed to the up  
arrow ↑ and -_ was changed to the down arrow ↓.  As in CA, these  
markers appear next to the words they affect and are not surrounded  
by spaces.  I have removed old section 7.4 from the manual where  
these markers were described and put the relevant material into  
section 6.4.  I have removed the -, and similar symbols from the  
CHECK depfile and replaced all occurrences of the old symbols in the  
database with the new CA forms.
      I hope that people interested in marking these features will  
find the new methods of coding useful.

Good luck,

Brian MacWhinney