Video usage

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Info-CHILDES,

   I received about 20 responses to my query about video resources.
Unfortunately, due to a mail glitch, I lost about five of the replies, but I
can reconstruct most of the ones I missed.  It appears that virtually all
new data collection uses digital video, whereas older video is either VHS or
reel-to-reel.  People often mentioned their willingness and intention to
contribute these data to CHILDES, even without my prodding, so it is clear
that we are going to have a lot of video data soon.  The barrier will be
finding out a good fast way to get this all digitized and then figuring out
a proper way of distributing pieces of the video database to interested
people.  So far, this is looking quite good.  Here is a summary of the
replies.

Sign Language:  (People studying this noted that everyone studying sign
language has to use video, so it was a bit misleading to ask about whether
video is used in this case.  Despite this, it is interesting to note that
not everyone in this area is using digital video.)

1. Gary Morgan (City University - London) is using video in his studies of
sign language acquisition.
2. Bruce Tomblin (Iowa) is studying the effects of cochlear implants, but
needs to track both verbal and manual communication.
3. Amy Weinberg (Berkeley) is studying deaf children aged 18 to 42 months
with an emphasis on the acquisition of attention-getting devices.

Social mechanisms of early language development:

1.  Pam Rollins (UTDallas) is investigating attunement and the communication
of intention during the period of 6 to 12 months.
2.  Manuela Wagner (Harvard, Graz, and MPI-Frankfurt) has studied several
groups of German infants and their mothers to understand the development of
intentionality in communication in normally developing and atypical
children.  These data are currently in CHILDES, but will be under restricted
usage conditions for a year or two.
3.  Mike Forrester (Nottingham) has done CA analysis of interactions with
his daughter.  One of these is in CHILDES.
4.  Takeo Ishii (Kyoto) has a large video database of his interactions with
his son that he has contributed to CHILDES.
5.  Virginia Yip and Steven Matthews have an ongoing project using video to
study bilingual Cantonese-English development.  The first files from this
project are already in CHILDES.
6.  Masahiko Minami (SFSU) has used video to study communication in Japanese
preschools in Japan and the Bay Area.

Second language acquisition:
1.  Kanae Igarashi (CMU) is studying English children learning Japanese in
elementary school.  She is mostly using the video as a contextual backup.
2.  Mela Sarkar (McGill) is studying 18 immigrant children aged 5-6 learning
French in inner-city Montreal.  Topics include teacher scaffolding,
nonverbal behavior, teaching practices, classroom dynamics, and growth in
learner competence.  She plans to contribute these data to CHILDES.
3.  Katerina Marshfield (Braunschweig) is organizing data analysis for a
project known as FFS Saxony which studies the learning of English, French,
and Czech by 7-8 year olds at seven primary schools in Saxony.  Data are
collected using a second of three interview tasks The focus is on collecting
speech with minidisk, but digital video is used as a supplement to the
transcript analysis.  The data will be contributed to CHILDES.

Existing video databases:
1.  Lorraine McCune's (Rutgers) cross-sectional and longitudinal studies
from the early 1980s, which we hope to digitize and include in CHILDES
beginning in May.
2.  Edy Veneziano (Geneva) has video material on 12 French-learning children
who were followed longitudinally.  There are also separate audio recordings
for many of these children.
3.  Marilyn Vihman (Bangor) has used video since 1980 to identify words and
other communicative behaviors during the period of the first words in
English, French, Japanese, Swedish, and Welsh. The emphasis has been on the
use of video to clarify aspects of phonological and prosodic analysis.
4.  Eve Clark (Stanford) has been collecting video in conjunction with
several studies over recent years.  Unfortunately, I lost the message that
detailed the shape of these data.
5.  Elizabeth Bates (UCSD) has a full set of video data to accompany the
audio files of the Bates corpus now in CHILDES.  She will contribute these
data to CHILDES.
6.  Susana Ornat (Madrid) has video to accompany the Ornat corpus now in
CHILDES.  She will contribute these data to CHILDES soon.

New video corpora:
1.  Elena Lieven (MPI-Leipzig, Manchester) is collecting new densely sampled
corpora with five hours of speech from each subject per week.  Of these five
hours, one hour will include video.
2.  Jordan Zlatev and Sudaporn Luksaaneeyanawin are constructing a new video
corpus of children learning Thai with an emphasis on parentese, early words,
and the communication of intentionality and emotion.
3.  Virginia Yip and Steven Matthews are continuing the study mentioned
above.

Turning outside the domain of child language acquisition, there are huge
collections of video of classroom interaction at Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, and
the LRDC in Pittsburgh.  There also appears to be a group of sociolinguists
studying peer group interactions in older children.  These additional
emphases often fit in well with some interests of child language
researchers.

--Brian MacWhinney