performance/competence, cooperation, and the future

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Jan,

    Unless I misread Tom's message, it seems that the meeting in  
Cyprus focused
more on issues such as quantifier spreading than on child phonology.   
However,
there is indeed an NIH-funded project on cross-linguistic phonological  
acquisition
directed by Yvan Rose and myself.  During the first year of this  
project, the focus has
been on the construction of an initial database.  In this regard  
Sophie Kern, Katherine
Demuth, Yvan Rose, Heather Goad, Paula Fikkert, Claartje Levelt,  
Barbara Davis, and
are in the process of contributing important
databases from a variety of languages that are slowly now being made  
public at
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/phon/
and (still in preparation)
http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/data/PhonBank/  (along  the big Providence  
and Lyon corpora
that are in Eng-USA and Romance/French respectively).

    A brief  scan  of the fascinating material that you have at your  
Paidologos home page
suggests that these projects differ somewhat in emphasis and involve  
two largely non-overlapping
groups  of researchers.  Paidologos emphasizes the construction of  
tests, whereas PhonBank
emphasizes the construction of a database of
naturalistic productions.  Still the ultimate aims of the projects are  
related and when we come to
the level of  computational analysis, the links and overlap seem even  
stronger.  So, it would seem to make
good sense to try to maximize the ability of researchers to access  
both resources in a parallel
and integrated fashion.  For example, it would be interesting  to be   
able to compare sequences derived from formal
assessment with  sequences revealed through naturalistic productions.
Perhaps this integration may be possible as we move forward.

   Yvan is scheduling the official release of the PHON  software for a  
month off.  The release
has been a bit delayed because we want to focus on making sure  
eveything is right.

   Also, you may be interested in joining the  phon at googlegroups.com  
mailing list which is
designed for further discussion of these issues.  Discussion of  
Paidologos issues would also be
quite appropriate on that list.

--Brian MacWhinney, CMU

On Nov 2, 2007, at 6:27 PM, JAN R EDWARDS wrote:

>
> Dear Tom,
>
> If it's possible, I'd like to find out more about the meeting
> on assessing children's learning in different European languages.
> I have an NIH-funded grant on cross-linguistic phonological
> acquisition (so far, we are looking at American English, Greek,
> French, Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean --
> see http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~edwards/) and we have done
> some preliminary work on developing some measures for Greek.
> I wasn't aware of a more organized effort in this regard.  Could you
> put me in touch with the organizers of this?  Thanks so much.
>
> Yours,
> Jan


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