update

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Phon People,

   This is a brief report on the PhonBank Workshop held in the last week of July at Memorial University in Newfoundland.  The 16 presentations at that workshop can be downloaded from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/phon/workshop.  The presentations discussed a wide variety of issues in the acquisition of phonology with a particular emphasis on the use of PhonBank corpora to test hypotheses.  Several of the presentations outlined suggested additions and modifications to the Phon program, as well as additional corpora that should be included in PhonBank.  I have also posted a summary of recent progress on Phon and PhonBank to that same website at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/phon/  where you can click on the link called "Update".  
    The current version of Phon is now 1.4 and it has several important new features, including export to Excel.  A top current priority is the integration of Phon with Praat and the conversion of current CHAT corpora in CHILDES to PhonBank format and vice versa.
     I believe it would be useful now to encourage people to use this mailing list to discuss topics such as these:
1.  Methods for processing corpora using Phon.
2.  Missing features in Phon.
3.  Issues with PhonBank corpora.
4.  Ideas about how to process PhonBank corpora effectively to answer questions.
5.  Suggested contributions of corpora or new corpus types to collect.
6.  General issues in phonological development.

During the meeting, we received many suggestions for additional corpora to add to PhonBank.  So, I may be contacting some of you directly in this regard.  Often we can help with digitization and reformatting, although we cannot help with fresh transcription.

Best wishes,

-- Brian MacWhinney

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