bibliographic searches and Info-CHILDES

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  Tamara is right in noting the increasing use of discussion groups for
basic bibliographic searches.  Jane Edwards correctly points out how
easy it is to use online bibliographies, if your university supports
them.
  I have two additional comments on these issues.  First, students may
wish to use the CHILDES/BIB bibliography.  Many libraries have hard
copies.  If you have the CHILDES CD-ROM, there is a copy there.
However, the current version of the bibliography on the net is almost
twice the size of the one on the CD.  It now has 23,600 references. You
and your students can download the whole bibliography from
childes.psy.cmu.edu/chibib/index.html.  However, they will also need to
download a free copy of the EndNote program from the link given there.
I am trying to find an easy on-line site for accessing the references
directly over the web.  One possibility might be the "Collection of
Computer Science Bibliographies".  Other suggestions are invited.
   If I could improve access to CHILDES/BIB, it would be a bit easier
to suggest to people that they should look there first before posting
queries to info-childes.  For example, a search for "modal*" in
CHILDES/BIB matched about 180 articles, many of which seemed quite
relevant to the recent bibliographic query on modals.  Similarly, a
search for author "Carey" in CHILDES/BIB matches not only the paper
that Lloyd Alford was looking for, but also other papers by Carey on
the same subject that are easier to find in the library.  Questions of
the form "Is there work on language X?" are also easily resolved this
way.
   However, other topics are a bit tougher.  For example, reducing Jeff
Allen's questions about prosodic structures and gestures to a series of
key word queries is not easy.   Jeff's question is not a mere
bibliographic question.  He is advancing a couple of specific claims
(prosody learned before syntax, and 50 percent of language is
gestural).  So, his question is really about whether anyone has
defended these specific claims.  For example, Ann Peter and Lise Menn
might conceivably (underscore "conceivably") say that they have
evidence in support of the idea that parents can understand their
children's intonation before they understand the content of their
utterances.  I will leave it up to others to decide if anyone would
support the idea that 50% of communication is gestural.
   The ideal situation seems to be something like this.  Before posting
a query to the list, the researcher or student consults either PsychLit
or CHILDES/BIB.  If they don't find what they need there, they then
post a note to the Web explaining that they found 100 matches to their
key words search, but none or few that seemed to clearly address the
more specific issue they have in mind.  At that point, I think that the
question becomes one that might interest us all.

--Brian MacWhinney