De-identifying name-spelling activities in CHAT

Fri May 8 22:59:54 UTC 2026

Thanks, Janet! We will follow your lead and use a pseudonym with the same 
number of letters to capture the letter usage (but use Child_name when the 
full name is spoken). 

I like your postcode convention for cloze prompts, but I think what is 
going on here is different. The dad is producing isolated syllables from 
the child's name to scaffold her writing, not to prompt her to complete the 
word. I wonder if the best fit for this is from p. 49 of the current CHAT 
manual: "In Japanese, many letters refer to whole syllables or “kana” such 
as ro or ka. To represent this as well as strings of letters in English, 
use the @k symbol, as in ka at k or jklmn at k." 

If we did that, the pseudonimized version would be as follows:

*MA1: v at l.
*MA1: va at k.
*MA1: ne at k.
*MA1: tan rápido?
*MA1: &=s_sound.
*CHI: es s at l.
*MA1: s at l vanes at k +...
*MA1: s at l.
*MA1: a at l, Child_name.

Any thoughts on whether this is how the @k is intended to be used?  Or a 
better way to represent the dad pronouncing the /s/ sound to prompt child 
to write the letter S?

-Sarah Surrain
Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education
Early Childhood, Multilingual, and Special Education
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

On Thursday, May 7, 2026 at 4:41:47 PM UTC-7 janet... at sjsu.edu wrote:

> 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 <sarahs... 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... at sjsu.edu | 408-924-3714 <(408)%20924-3714>
> https://www.sjsu.edu/education/faculty/janet-bang.php
>

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