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Childes

More Info: Online on the Internet: CHILDES Homepage

What is the CHILDES-database?

CHILDES (CHIld Language Data Exchange System) was founded by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow and is located at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh). The Max-Planck-Institute is one of the centers for distribution and support.

The CHILDES-database has three main components and services:

CHILDES
A public domain data base for corpora on first and second language acquisition
CHAT
Transcription guidelines for language acquisition data
CLAN
Programs to analyze the data (e.g. search routines, frequency counts)

CHILDES

CHILDES stores acquisition data on a variety of languages and also on bilingual acquisition and acquisition with language disorders, as well as crosslinguistic samples of narrative data. The format of the corpora is non-homogeneous, but over the last years attempts have been made to reformat as many corpora as possible into CHAT-format, so that all CLAN programs can run on them smoothly (CHAT-files are identified by the extension *.cha). CHILDES files are stored in ASCII-format.

CHAT

The CHAT format has main tiers for all speakers' utterances (*NAME), and so-called dependent tiers providing information on context as well as semantic, syntactic and morphological analyses (%con, %mor). The user is free to define and create as many dependent tiers as necessary for the analyses intended.

CLAN

CLAN offers search routines (combo), frequency counts (freq) and many more tools to extract relevant information from the data. Most programs also run on non-chat files, but this limits the specificity of the programs. Though the CHILDES-project is primarily designed for language acquisition research, the transcript guidelines from CHAT and the analysis-procedures from CLAN are very flexible and can in principle be adapted to all kinds of transcripts of spoken or written language. Also, you can add as many coding tiers as you like to existing data (Using CHAT or CLAN tools does not mean that you have to give your data or analyses to the database).

How do I get more information?

MacWhinney, B. (1995). The CHILDES-Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk. Second edition. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum

The book gives guidelines for using the separate components of CHILDES i.e. how to transcribe data according to the CHAT-transcription guidelines, how to use the CLAN programs, and on the corpora available.

Additional information can be found on the internet. Check out http://www.psy.cmu.edu/childes or write to:

  • postal mail:
  • Brian MacWhinney
  • Department of Psychology
  • Carnegie Mellon University
  • Pittsburgh, PA 15213 (U.S.A.)

Further information and coding schemata for temporal, spatial and personal reference are given in:

Hickman, M., Liang, J., Hendriks, H. & F. Roland (1990). The Development of Discourse Cohesion: Coding Manual. Nijmegen: Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics.

Additionally, CHILDES runs an e-mail network which posts information on updates or additions to the database, conferences, and questions to the scientific community. To enroll, send mail to: info-childes-request@andrew.cmu.edu (Internet)

Last updated: February 14, 2000 13:31

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