Purpose of CHILDES?

Wed Jan 5 18:28:30 UTC 2011

Dear InfoChildes and Orangeman,

Just another 2-cents:

In thinking of how researchers use the database, I am reminded of the 
letters many of us wrote when the funding was up for renewal.  Numbers of 
themspoke directly to David's question, "What would people do if there were 
no CHILDES?"  At one point, Brian put them in one document.  It's probably 
more than he needs to read, but perhaps they are available, at least in an 
archive of the listserv. Are they?

Another use of the database is for teaching, not just in classes, but to 
bring research assistants up to speed before turning them loose on your own 
data.

Cheers,

Happy 1/1/11 and the subsequent 364 days to everyone.
Barbara
*************************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Depts of Linguistics & Communication Disorders
RAB, 70 Butterfield Terrace
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003

Tel: 413-545-5023
Fax: 413-545-2792

bpearson at research.umass.edu
www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Brian MacWhinney" <macw at cmu.edu>
To: <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 12:44 PM
Subject: Re: Purpose of CHILDES?

> Dear David,
>
>     Thanks to Diane for pointing out some of the crucial information you 
> can use for
> your project.  Let me add a few things for your essay.
>
> Often people in child language like to compute numbers to characterize 
> corpora.
> They may want to track overall development, single-subject development, or 
> make group
> comparisons.  To do this, they can use programs like MLU, VOCD, KWAL, MOR, 
> MORTABLE, DSS,
> and so on to tabulate frequencies by lexical type, syntactic type, and so 
> on.  To understand this
> you could learn the various programs included in CLAN, which you could 
> download from the
> CHILDES home page. Also, you could begin to focus on some topic area and 
> then read the
> relevant literature that has been published on the subject.  If you click 
> on the link called "Research based on
> CHILDES"  it will take you to http://talkbank.org/usage/, where you will 
> find a link to a bibliography of 3200
> articles based on use of the CHILDES data.
>
> The data can also be used for focused analysis of phonological 
> development.  Take a look at the PhonBank
> project for that.  And they can be used for computational modeling of 
> language acquisition.  A recent issue
> of the Journal of Child Language has a set of 8 papers that illustrate 
> some of these uses.
>
> I could add more, but I think the main thing here is to give you a bit of 
> direction for narrowing down your
> questions.  Good luck with your essay,
>
> -- Brian  MacWhinney
>
> On Jan 5, 2011, at 6:39 AM, Orangeman wrote
>
>> Hello, I am a student of Phonetics at the Croatian Faculty of social
>> sciences in Zagreb and I am writing an essay on CHILDES.
>>
>> I apologize in advance if the following questions may seem odd or
>> naive, but I am trying to understand the purpose of this database. I
>> understand that people use it in their research of first language
>> acquisition, as it is defined in the Wikipedia and other online
>> articles I have viewed. But how does that data actually help a
>> researcher? What does that researcher do with that data? While
>> browsing randomly through the database I have viewed some clips and
>> transcripts on it and it just seems like children talking with their
>> parents, how does that help? What would a researcher have to do if
>> CHILDES didn't exist? How would he or she conduct research without it?
>> Mind you, I have never conducted any similar research so that is
>> probably why the function of CHILDES eludes me, and my professor said
>> I need to pay special attention to explaining its purpose. I know all
>> these questions make me seem shortsighted and a complete layman, and I
>> feel like I am going to be flameposted to a crisp :), but if anyone
>> can answer them I would deeply appreciate it.
>> Thank you in advance.
>>
>> *puts on asbestos suit*
>>
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