Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on CHILDES

[Katie Alcock]

I¹d love to know if this particular phenomenon has been formally researched,
as I have an American mother and used to think one ate ³chocolate putting²
and that we lived in ³Leamington Spot².  A Canadian living in Scotland that
I used to know had a daughter who asked people ³are you going to the
wetting?²  I know that children overcompensate for the accent they hear in
their spelling (³Chinar²), but I haven¹t seen anything on spoken language.

Katie Alcock


Katie Alcock, DPhil
Lecturer
Department of Psychology
University of Lancaster
Fylde College
Lancaster LA1 4YF
Tel 01524 593833
Fax 01524 593744
Web http://www.psych.lancs.ac.uk/people/KatieAlcock.html



From: Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith <a.karmiloff-smith at ich.ucl.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2004 18:26:49 +0100
To: "Gordon, Peter" <pgordon at exchange.tc.columbia.edu>,
info-childes at mail.talkbank.org
Subject: Re: Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on CHILDES

Just got back from being with my six grandchildren, three of whom were
visiting from the UK their cousins who live in Manhatten.
Here's a gem for you!

5 year old:  "let's play baddles"
4 year old: "it's not baddles, it's battles. Battles doesn't rhyme with
paddles""!

hope you're well
best
Annette


At 12:06 pm -0400 30/7/04, Gordon, Peter wrote:
> Proposal to develop a GEMS folder on CHILDES
>  
> Many of us in the child language community are parents, but we don't have the
> time or organization to collect large language samples from our kids.
> However, probably most of us have kept a notebook handy to record interesting
> things that our kids say.  Sometimes they just never get used because it's not
> really enough to publish and might end up being only an anecdote in our
> classes.  It seems to me that this is a rich source of unsystematic but
> theoretically relevant data.  It's the kind of data that will only show up
> fortuitously in the more systematic data collections but because we as child
> language researchers are trained to know when something is remarkable, we can
> identify such utterances easily and jot them down.  Think of all of the rich
> examples that have become available, for example, from Melissa Bowerman with
> these kinds of data.
>  
> I would suggest that we develop a format for distributing these gems --
> perhaps the same basic CHAT format in little mini files--  and have a folder
> in which these can be reside on CHILDES.  Perhaps we could include key words
> that would help to identify the kind of error that the child made.  This would
> not substitute for true quantitative data, but it might be useful for
> answering questions, for example,  about whether or not kids ever make errors
> of certain types.  Such errors may never show up in the systematic speech
> samples but nevertheless could be found within the broader language output of
> the child.  Perhaps we could start off by seeing how many of us have these
> scrappy notebooks lying around waiting to be mined.  Perhaps if there were a
> public place to deposit such data, this might encourage people to do this
> more.
>  
>  
> Peter Gordon
>  
>  
> Peter Gordon, Associate Professor
> 525 W 120th St. Box 180
> Biobehavioral Sciences Department
> Teachers College, Columbia University
> New York, NY 10027
>  
> (212) 678-8162
>  
> 
> 
>  



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20040803/2cc32e48/attachment.htm>