Purpose of CHILDES?

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear David,

     Thanks to Diane for pointing out some of the crucial information you can use for
your project.  Let me add a few things for your essay. 

Often people in child language like to compute numbers to characterize corpora.
They may want to track overall development, single-subject development, or make group
comparisons.  To do this, they can use programs like MLU, VOCD, KWAL, MOR, MORTABLE, DSS,
and so on to tabulate frequencies by lexical type, syntactic type, and so on.  To understand this
you could learn the various programs included in CLAN, which you could download from the
CHILDES home page. Also, you could begin to focus on some topic area and then read the 
relevant literature that has been published on the subject.  If you click on the link called "Research based on
CHILDES"  it will take you to http://talkbank.org/usage/, where you will find a link to a bibliography of 3200
articles based on use of the CHILDES data.  

The data can also be used for focused analysis of phonological development.  Take a look at the PhonBank
project for that.  And they can be used for computational modeling of language acquisition.  A recent issue
of the Journal of Child Language has a set of 8 papers that illustrate some of these uses.

I could add more, but I think the main thing here is to give you a bit of direction for narrowing down your
questions.  Good luck with your essay,

-- Brian  MacWhinney

On Jan 5, 2011, at 6:39 AM, Orangeman wrote

> Hello, I am a student of Phonetics at the Croatian Faculty of social
> sciences in Zagreb and I am writing an essay on CHILDES.
> 
> I apologize in advance if the following questions may seem odd or
> naive, but I am trying to understand the purpose of this database. I
> understand that people use it in their research of first language
> acquisition, as it is defined in the Wikipedia and other online
> articles I have viewed. But how does that data actually help a
> researcher? What does that researcher do with that data? While
> browsing randomly through the database I have viewed some clips and
> transcripts on it and it just seems like children talking with their
> parents, how does that help? What would a researcher have to do if
> CHILDES didn't exist? How would he or she conduct research without it?
> Mind you, I have never conducted any similar research so that is
> probably why the function of CHILDES eludes me, and my professor said
> I need to pay special attention to explaining its purpose. I know all
> these questions make me seem shortsighted and a complete layman, and I
> feel like I am going to be flameposted to a crisp :), but if anyone
> can answer them I would deeply appreciate it.
> Thank you in advance.
> 
> *puts on asbestos suit*
> 
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