adult-to-adult conversations in digital format?

[Margaret Fleck]

The best choice is going to depend a lot on what sort of conversation you are looking
for and what you want to measure.    All the existing spoken English corpora have their own quirky properties and limitations.    Others you should be looking at (beyond what has previously been mentioned):
 
      Switchboard:   has heavy-duty syntax markup
      Fisher:   big.    supposed to be more natural than Switchboard.   
      Santa Barbara corpus of spoken American English:  diverse.   I think they tried to 
            capture a range of social situations, e.g. arguments, sermons, family gatherings...
      Buckeye:   one person doing most of the talking in each conversation, but about
            the only sizeable corpus phonetically transcribed.   More natural than Switchboard.
      Map Task:  task-based conversation, which might be a lot more comparable to
            some of the kid data 
 
I don't think there is one such thing as a "normal" conversation.    The task-based
chatter of several kids playing a first-person shooter game doesn't sound even
remotely like the same kids playing politely in their school classroom.    And neither
sounds like a family dinner or a phone conversation.       So it seems important to
compare conversations of a closely similar type to get a clear comparison between
adult-child, child-child, and/or adult-adult data.     
 
Margaret Fleck (Illinois)

--- On Mon, 8/8/11, Virginia Valian <vvvstudents at gmail.com> wrote:


From: Virginia Valian <vvvstudents at gmail.com>
Subject: adult-to-adult conversations in digital format?
To: info-childes at googlegroups.com
Date: Monday, August 8, 2011, 7:21 AM


Dear CHILDES community,

I am looking for adult-to-adult conversations, in American English (so the BNC is out), that have been transcribed and are in digital format.  I want to compare adult-to-adult speech with adult-to-child speech.  CHILDES (thank you, Brian) gives us thousands of hours of adult-to-child.  I don't need *thousands* of hours of adult-to-adult but I would like several hours of normal conversation.  Hence, I do not want very short routine phone conversations.  Nor do I want academic conversations, including student-to-student conversations about difficult topics like DNA.  CoCA is not usable because one can only search it, not download whole conversations.  Suggestions will be gratefully received either via this list or to me at virginia.valian at hunter.cuny.edu

Sincerely,

Virginia Valian
Distinguished Professor
Department of Psychology, Hunter College
PhD Programs in Linguistics, Psychology, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, CUNY Grad Center
vvvstudents at gmail.com

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