Purpose of CHILDES?

Thu Jan 6 11:42:55 UTC 2011

Esteemed professor MacWhinney,
Thank you for your reply and useful information you have provided me
with, it will most certainly be helpful in finishing my essay.

Thank you, professor Barbara Zurer Pearson for your input as well, I
think I now have enough information to work with.

Another warm thank you for all your suggestions and time spent to
answer my questions.

On Jan 5, 8:06 pm, Brian MacWhinney <m... at cmu.edu> wrote:
> Dear Barbara and David (Orangeman),
>       Good idea.  Yes, those letters are available at the same link, which ishttp://talkbank.org/usage/.  There are letters there for CHILDES, PhonBank, and AphasiaBank.
>
> --Brian
>
> On Jan 5, 2011, at 1:28 PM, Barbara Zurer Pearson wrote:
>
> > 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
>
> > bpear... at research.umass.edu
> >www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
>
> > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian MacWhinney" <m... 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 tohttp://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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