De-identifying name-spelling activities in CHAT

Thu May 7 23:41:08 UTC 2026

Hi Sarah,

De-identifying a name-spelling activity - This has come up for us too
before. The decision for us came down to how we were going to analyze the
data. We ultimately decided we wanted to capture the letter-usage, and we
were ok with using a pseudonym or replacement letters. For example, for us
with a name like 'Hannah', we decided to keep the repetition and use a
nonsense set of letters (e.g., abccba - using @l with each letter, so it
could retain the number of letters and any repeated letters). Each time
they used the child's name we replaced it with something like "child_name".

For any syllable teaching or teaching with a partial word, we marked them
as a cloze utterance with our own postcode convention (below). This did
mean that the partial words did not count for our purposes when we analyzed
tokens/types, but it was a small portion of the data so ultimately we let
that go but retained it in the transcript and had the postcode in case we
wanted to go back to it.
*MOT:       &+tur? [+ cloze]
*CHI:        &+tle. [+ cloze]

When things were in Spanish, we also added the precode when the whole
utterance was in Spanish, or we added the @s for each word.

Our conventions are here:
https://talkbank.org/childes/access/Eng-NA/FMB_home.html.

Feel free to email me separately if you want me to share our internal lab
manual.

Janet

On Thu, May 7, 2026 at 2:50 PM Sarah Surrain <sarahsurrain at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm working on a new corpus of child language data drawn from randomly
> selected 5-minute clips of daylong home recordings. We're transcribing in
> ELAN using CHAT conventions. Our de-identification protocol replaces the
> child's spoken name with "Child_name" throughout. I have two related
> questions that I don't think the CHAT manual addresses directly, and I'd
> love the community's input.
>
> 1.* De-identifying a name-spelling activity:* In this clip, a father and
> daughter dyad engage in a name-spelling activity. He guides her through the
> letters and sounds of her name as she writes the letters. Transcribing this
> verbatim would effectively reveal the child's name through the sequence of
> letters and sounds, even if we never write the name itself.
>
> Here is a pseudonymized version of the exchange (the child's name has been
> replaced with "Vanessa"). MA1 = Male Adult 1 (the father):
>
> Original Spanish:
> *MA1: v at l.
> *MA1: /va/.
> *MA1: /ne/.
> *MA1: tan rápido?
> *MA1: /s/.
> *CHI: es s at l.
> *MA1: s at l Vanes +...
> *MA1: s at l.
> *MA1: a at l, Vanessa.
>
> English Translation:
> *MA1: v at l.
> *MA1: /va/.
> *MA1: /ne/.
> *MA1: so fast?
> *MA1: /s/.
> *CHI: it's s at l.
> *MA1: s at l, Vanes...
> *MA1: s at l.
> *MA1: a at l, Vanessa.
>
> I've considered replacing the actual letters and sounds with the
> corresponding letters/sounds of a pseudonym, or just using a placeholder
> like [Child_name spelled] or &=spells_child_name.
>
> *2. Transcribing deliberate, isolated letter sounds and syllables*. This
> exchange also raises another transcription question. The father produces
> isolated phonemes (/s/) and syllables (/va/, /ne/) as deliberate
> pedagogical acts — he is teaching his daughter how to spell her name by
> modeling its component sounds. This is distinct from letter naming, which
> CHAT handles with @l. Is there a CHAT convention for this? (Because it is
> in Spanish, we have the added complication that sometimes the letter name
> and letter sound are the same, as in the final A of Vanessa.)
>
> Any guidance on either question would be much appreciated!
>
> Thanks,
> Sarah Surrain
>
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-- 
Janet Y. Bang, Ph.D (she/her/hers)
Assistant Professor
Child and Adolescent Development
Lurie College of Education, San José State University
janet.bang at sjsu.edu | 408-924-3714
https://www.sjsu.edu/education/faculty/janet-bang.php

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