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CHILDES</title></head><body>
<div>Just got back from being with my six grandchildren, three of whom
were visiting from the UK their cousins who live in Manhatten.</div>
<div>Here's a gem for you!</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>5 year old: "let's play baddles"</div>
<div>4 year old: "it's not baddles, it's battles. Battles doesn't
rhyme with paddles""!</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>hope you're well</div>
<div>best</div>
<div>Annette</div>
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<div>At 12:06 pm -0400 30/7/04, Gordon, Peter wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000000">Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on
CHILDES</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000000">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.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">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.</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">Peter
Gordon</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1"
color="#000000">Peter Gordon, Associate Professor</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">525 W 120th
St. Box 180</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial"
size="-1">Biobehavioral Sciences Department</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">Teachers
College, Columbia University</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">New York, NY
10027</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><font face="Arial" size="-1">(212)
678-8162</font></blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite> </blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
<font size="-1"><br>
</font> </blockquote>
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