Ann Peters' Filler Page

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,
  Ann Peters and Katsura Aoyama have created a fascinating set of
illustrations of "fillers" in both pre- and protomorphology.  The URL is
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/html/concepts.html

Ann's illustrations are provided in CHAT form as taken from the
Peters-Wilson Seth transcripts.  By clicking on the example, you can
directly play and hear the filler examples.  They include examples between
content words and at the beginnings of short phrases.
  I found that the provision of these examples did a lot to directly enrich
my understanding of these phenomena.  At the same time, it allowed me to
sharpen certain questions that were previously inarticulate.  In some
cases, I tended to hear the fillers as weak attempts to pronounce standard
closed class items.  In other cases, it was difficult to view them as
anything more than pure fillers.

  I am hoping that other researchers can contribute to the discussion of
fillers by
adding their own audio-based examples  (you can mail them to me or Ann)
which further support the analysis and perhaps clarify the range of
structures to which it tends to apply.  Ann's examples come from a single
child.  I am thinking that I could find similar materials in my children's
audio files, now that I understand more clearly what I might be looking
for. Ann provides a nice bibliography on this topic.  I wonder if the
original data for these various articles is still available.  For example,
maybe Lise Menn can locate some of her examples from Jacob that illustrate
similar patterns.

  It would also be interesting to develop a method for suggesting
alternative and/or supporting analyses of these examples.  Eventually, it
would be good to have a way to link alternative accounts and even competing
theories to these specific illustrations directly through the web.
Although the precise technology for doing this is not yet fully clear, we
could work out something, if there is interest.

These files played fine for me on both Mac with Netscape 4.7 and on Windows
with IE5.  However, on both machines I have recent versions of QuickTime
loaded.  If your browser complains that you need new versions of QuickTime,
you can download it from
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/

I think that these illustrations can be useful not only for researchers,
but also for students.  If you can think of additional concepts and topics
in child language that could be treated through web-based materials of this
type, please tell me or, even better, post your ideas to the info-childes
list.  I suggested a few such topics on the "Concepts" web page, just by
way of illustration.

--Brian MacWhinney