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1. 11 12 13 14 15 16 Ix 18 19 Dialect form is often an interesting general property of a transcript However the coding of phonological dialect variations on the word level should be mini mized because it often makes transcripts more difficult to read and analyze In stead general patterns of phonological variation can be noted in the readme file Family specific forms are much like child invented forms that have been taken over by the whole family Sometimes the source of these forms are children but they can also be older members of the family Sometimes the forms come from variations of words in another language An example might be the use of under toad to refer to some mysterious being in the surf although the word was simply undertow initially General special form marking with g can be used when all of the above fail However its use should generally be avoided Marking with the without a following letter is not accepted by CHECK Interjections can be indicated in standard ways making the use of the i nota tion usually not necessary Instead of transcribing ahem i one can simply transcribe ahem following the conventions listed later Letters can either be transcribed with the 1 marker or simply as single character words Strings of letters are marked as k Neologisms are meant to refer to morphological coinages If the novel form is monomorphemic then it should be characterized as a c
2. 99 CHAT Manual 47 Other strings with numbers are monetary amounts percentages times fractions logarithms and so on All should be written out in words as in eight thousand two hundred and twenty dollars for 8220 twenty nine point five percent for 29 5 seven fifteen for 7 15 ten o clock ay m for 10 00 AM and four and three fifths Titles such as Dr or Mr should be written out in their full capitalized form as Doctor or Mister as in Doctor Spock and Mister Rogers For Mrs use the form Missus 6 6 6 Kinship Forms The following table lists some of the most important kinship address forms in standard American English The forms with asterisks cannot be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Table 2 Kinship Forms Gramp s Grandfather Pa Father Grampy Grandfather Pap Father Grandpa Grandfater Pappy Father Ma Mother Pop Father Mom Mehr 2 6 6 7 Shortenings One of the biggest problems that the transcriber faces is the tendency of speakers to drop sounds out of words For example a speaker may leave the initial a off of about saying instead bout In CHAT this shortened form appears as a bout clan can easily ignore the parentheses and treat the word as about Alternatively there is a CLAN option to allow the commands to treat the word as a spelling variant Many co
3. CHAT Manual 102 perbl u table le0 gu left p m the error involves metathesis transcribe using IPA and attach u to the error stiso z Qu sisters midwets Qu midwest s Semantic errors s r the error is a recognizable English word that is semantically related to the target word Note the use of the double colon to indicate that the error is a real word fork knife anybody anything prince princess he she s ur the error is a real word for which the target is known but it is not semantically related to the target and does not meet the criteria for phonological errors as stated above fares scared hi time fry drive s uk the error is a real word for which the target is unknown Here the words marked as errors made no sense given the context in which they were used Therefore no target form is given PAR I m going to get somebody bough s uk PAR and I go wolf s uk s per repetition of a word when it is no longer appropriate Brookshire 1997 PAR The boy kicked the ball through the ball window s per n Neologistic errors transcribe using IPA and attach u to the error n k the error is a non word for which the target is known but does not meet criteria for semantic or phonemic errors as stated above PAR she had all her gizestidz1z u groceries n k n uk the error is a non word fo
4. Ross said I don t need to throw my blocks out the window anymore Date This header indicates the date of the interaction The entry for this header is given in the form day month year The date is abbreviated in the same way as in the Birth header entry Here is an example of a completed Date header line Date 01 JUL 1965 CHAT Manual 34 Because we have some corpora going back over a century it is important to include the full value for the year Also because the days of the month should always have two digits it is necessary to add a leading 0 for days such as 01 Eg and Eg These headers are used to mark the end of a gem for analysis by the GEM command If there is a colon you must follow the colon with a tab and then one or more code words Each Eg must have a matching Bg If the Eg form is used then the text following it must exactly match the text in the corresponding Bg You can nest one set of Bg Eg markers inside another but double embedding is not allowed You can also begin a new pair before finishing the current one but again this cannot be done for three beginnings G This header is used in conjunction with the GEM program which is described in the CLAN manual It marks the beginning of gems when no nesting or overlapping of gems occurs Each gem is defined as material that begins with an Wg marker and ends with the next g marker We refer to these markers as lazy
5. Svartvik J amp Quirk R Eds 1980 A corpus of English conversation Lund Gleerup Liber Szuman S 1955 Rozw j tresci slownika u dziece Studia Pedagogicane 2 Talmy L 1985 Lexicalization patterns Semantic structure in lexical forms In T Shopen Ed Language typology and semantic description Vol 3 Grammatical categories and the lexicon pp 36 149 Cambridge UK Cambridge University Press Trager G 1958 Paralanguage A first approximation Studies in Linguistics 13 1 12 Wernicke C 1874 Die Aphasische Symptomenkomplex The aphasic symptom com plex Breslau Cohn amp Weigart
6. esie re eI RI YUR IER CURT RENTES EATEN DEA US VERE RUNE 12 DM E RE E 1i LAEE EEE E E EE E EA coe inna ase eu a E E E E E 13 Bs Principles Ne UE 14 Sb CCOmDUTGEIZ ATOM a io aee E tx E E E Has E E 14 32 Wotds of Caution osien aE A A ERE EE a 15 3 2 1 The Dominance of the Written Word sees ene 15 3 2 2 The Misuse of Standard Punctudtion c eti ers sd ei te eH sodio edad 16 3 2 3 Working With VIdeucs tette tt sade re ihe pasa boad Ae etaed iteta ti is ruso tat iae eiu 16 3 3 Problems With Forced DeelstOllssasi eedevoe a qos ibd eI roD eIR 17 34 Transcription and Coding i enn ves ee etate eda ei sta etate ecto nave nta id dan aves 17 oov Three GOAS inene pO eti d OH dte bidiaten tetto d EROR 18 ENG LE Warp ec IN 20 4T GnmcHAT the Porm or PIessdu ore HE PETER E or RRT 20 42 minGHAT Words and Utterances acce e Ee ret Pee na PURA sees 20 45 Analyzing One Small BIG aee d E eae pest bua E ke qe t tuat qe ees 21 dob iC dot tenet wot re les son rc etu ea ici studere M ric 21 45 The Documentation File 5 ecu e ERU HOD a E ee 22 4 6 Checking Syntactic ACCUTACY uoce erect tene con les eat aon Leto ane op Re e edo ees dodi dines 23 S File Headers NN eC ME M 24 po Ublidden Headers s octo tomato teat ainsi attt E etos ceste athens 24 2 2 SMTA CASTS c end eor D Ev o Ute ive ated io eset IR a 25 5 3 Participant Specific Headers en o eee t ease FE ATA YVE ME Gunn 30 S4 Constant Headers rissies ta eere e sau esa baee Ee se
7. If what is important is not the actual word omitted but its part of speech then a code for the part of speech can follow the zero Similarly the identity of the omitted word is always a guess The best guess is placed on the main line This item would be counted for scoping CHAT Manual 44 conventions but it would not be included in the MLU count Here is an example of its use EVE I want Oto go It is very difficult to know when a word has been omitted However the following criteria can be used to help make this decision for English data 1 Oart Unless there is a missing plural a common noun without an article is coded as Oart 2 Ov Sentences with no verbs can be coded as having missing verbs Of course often the omission of a verb can be viewed as a grammatical use of ellipsis 3 Qaux In standard English sentences like he running clearly have a missing auxiliary 4 Osubj In English every finite verb requires a subject 5 Opobj Every preposition requires an object However often a preposition may be functioning as an adverb The coder must look at the verb to decide whether a word is functioning as a preposition as in John put on Opobj or an adverb as in Mary jumped up In English there seldom are solid grounds for assigning codes like Oadj Oadv Oobj Oprep or Odat 6 6 Standardized Spellings There are a number of common words in the English language that cannot be found in the dictionary o
8. amp Burnard L Eds 1992 Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange Waterloo University of Waterloo Stemberger J 1985 The lexicon in a model of language production New York Garland Stern C amp Stern W 1907 Die Kindersprache Leipzig Barth Trager G 1958 Paralanguage A first approximation Studies in Linguistics 13 1 12 Wernicke C 1874 Die Aphasische Symptomenkomplex Breslau Cohn amp Weigart CHAT Manual 117 Selting M 1998 Gespr chsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem GAT Linguistische Berichte 173 91 122 Slobin D 1977 Language change in childhood and in history In J Macnamara Ed Language learning and thought pp 185 214 New York Academic Press Slobin D I 1993 Coding child language data for crosslinguistic analysis In J A Ed wards amp M D Lampert Eds Talking data Transcription and coding in discourse research pp 207 219 Hillsdale NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Sokolov J L amp Snow C Eds 1994 Handbook of research in language development using CHILDES Hillsdale NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Sperberg McQueen C M amp Burnard L Eds 1992 Guidelines for electronic text encoding and interchange Waterloo University of Waterloo Stemberger J 1985 The lexicon in a model of language production New York Garland Stern C amp Stern W 1907 Die Kindersprache Child language Leipzig Barth
9. and paragrammatic utterances in the grammatical error category should have inappropriate juxtapositions of grammatical elements PAR we got little things over here 4 es PAR there was nothing in that one there es Perseveration per repetition of an utterance when it is no longer appropriate Brookshire 1997 Circumlocution cir talking around words concepts PAR and through the help of the whatever fairy or whoever the x 3 what the lady that is helping Cinderella amp um she has the chance to check the the prince check the amp s amp uh shoe 4 cir PAR this guy is amp cr amp h hepm u helping p n with other people having problems cir CHAT Manual 105 15 Morphosyntactic Coding Many students of child language are interested in examining the role of universals in language acquisition To test for the impact of universals researchers need to examine the development of grammatical marking and syntax in corpora from different languages If such research is to be conducted efficiently it must be made available to computational analysis This requires use of a standard representation of morphosyntactic codings This chapter presents a system for constructing such a representation using the mor tiers This system is intended as a full replacement for the system of main line morpheme segmentation that was used in CHAT from 1984 to 1996 It is now possible to automatica
10. combined on the Languages line The first code given is for the language used most frequently in the transcript Individual utterances in a second or third most frequent languages can be marked with precodes as in this example CHI eng this is my juguete s In this example Spanish is the most frequent language but the particular sentence is marked as English The Languages header lists spa for Spanish and then eng for English Within this English sentence the use of a Spanish word is then marked as s When the gs is used in the main body of the transcript without the eng then it indicates a shift to English rather than to Spanish The s code may also be used to explicitly mark the use of a particular language even if it is not included in the Languages header For example the code schlep s yid can be used to mark the inclusion of the Yiddish word schlep in any text The s code can also be further elaborated to mark code blended words The form well s eng amp cym indicates that the word well could be either an English or a Welsh word The combination of a stem from one language with an inflection from another can be marked using the plus sign as in swallowni s engthun for an English stem with a Hungarian infinitival marking All of these codes can be followed by a code with the to explicitly mark the parts of speech Thus the form recordar s v inf indicates that this Spanish word is an infinitive The marking of
11. if you are convinced that these forms are monomorphemic 6 6 9 Exclamations Exclamations and interjections such as ah and gosh are very frequent However because their phonological shape varies so much they often have an unclear lexical status The following table provides standard shapes for these words For consistency these forms should be used even when the actual phonological form diverges from the standardizing convention as long as the variant is perceived as related to the standard Rather than creating new forms for variations in vowel length it is better to use forms such as a h for aah The MOR program uses a standard set of these forms in its fillers and communicators files that you may wish to consult Words that are marked with an asterisk cannot be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Table 5 Exclamations relief joy sympathy CHAT Manual 50 tu ug uhoh mum tsy ya a cheer fear i i disgust effort 6 6 10 Communicators Another set of interjections such as uhhuh and yep signal communicative or interactional functions such as agreement disagreement and pauses A sampling of these forms is given below Words that are marked with an asterisk cannot be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Table 6 Communicators thinking waiting 6 6 11 Spelling Variants There are a number of words that are misspelled so frequently that the misspellings
12. it s it s it s it s like a um dog By default all of the clan commands except mlu mlt and modrep include repeated material This default can be changed by using the 16 switch Multiple Repetition x N CHAT Manual 7A An alternative way of indicating several repetitions of a single word uses this form HAR it s x 4 like a um dog This form indicates the fact that a word has been repeated four times If this form is used it is not possible to get a count of the repetitions to be added to MLU However because this is not usually desirable anyway there are good reasons to use this more compact form when single words are repeated For some illustrations of the use of this type of coding for the study of disfluencies such as stuttering consult Bernstein Ratner Rooney and MacWhinney 1996 Retracing This symbol is used when a speaker starts to say something stops repeats the basic phrase changes the syntax but maintains the same idea Usually the correction moves closer to the standard form but sometimes it moves away from it The material being retraced is enclosed in angle brackets If there are no angle brackets CLAN assumes that only the preceding word is being retraced In retracing with correction it is necessarily true that the material in the angle brackets is different from what follows the retracing symbol Here is an example of this BET lt I wanted uh I thought I wanted to i
13. scripts from Adam Eve and Sarah Brown 1973 with other researchers These transcripts were typed onto stencils and mimeographed in multiple copies The extra copies were lent to and analyzed by a wide variety of researchers In this model researchers took their copy of the transcript home developed their own coding scheme applied it usually by making pencil markings directly on the transcript wrote a paper about the results and if very polite sent a copy to Roger Some of these reports Moerk 1983 even attempted to disprove the conclusions drawn from those data by Brown himself During this early period the relations between the various coding schemes often remained shrouded in mystery A fortunate consequence of the unstable nature of coding systems was that researchers were very careful not to throw away their original data even after it had been coded Brown himself commented on the impending transition to computers in this passage Brown 1973 p 53 It is sensible to ask and we were often asked Why not code the sentences for grammatically significant features and put them on a computer so that studies could readily be made by anyone My answer always was that I was continually discovering new kinds of information that could be mined from a transcription of conversation and never felt that I knew what the full coding should be This was certainly the case and indeed it can be said that in the entire decade since 1962 investig
14. that has received extensive attention 1s one proposed by Ninio amp Wheeler 1986 Ninio Snow Pan amp Rollins 1994 provided a simplified version of this system called INCA A or Inventory of Communicative Acts Abridged The next two sections give the cate gories of interchange types and illocutionary forces in the proposed INCA A system 13 1 Interchange Types Table 44 Interchange Type Codes Explanation to comfort and express sympathy for misfortune DCA discussing clarification to discuss clarification of hearer s of action nonverbal communicative acts DCC discussing clarification to discuss clarification of hearer s ambiguous verbal hui of communication communication or a confirmation of the speaker s understanding of it discussing the fantasy to hold a conversation within fantasy play world DHA directing hearer s at to achieve joint focus of attention by directing tention hearer s attention to objects persons and events DHS discussing hearer s to hold a conversation about hearer s nonobservable sentiments thoughts and feelings discussing a joint focus to hold a conversation about something that both par DNP of attention ticipants are attending to e g objects persons on going actions of hearer and speaker ongoing events discussing the nonpre to hold a conversation about topics that are not ob sent servable in the environment e g past and future CHAT Manual 96 Lhd events and actions
15. Action Tier act This tier describes the actions of the speaker or the listener Here is an example of text accompanied by the speaker s actions ROS I do it gact runs to toy box The act tier can also be used in conjunction with the 0 symbol when actions are performed in place of speaking ADA O act kicks the ball This could also be coded as ADA O act kicks the ball And if one does not care about preserving the identification of the information as an action the following form can be used ADA O kicks the ball The choice among these three forms depends on the extent to which the coder wants to keep track of a particular type of dependent tier information The first form preserves this best and the last form fails to preserve it at all Actions also include gestures such as nodding pointing waving and shrugging Addressee Tier add This tier describes who talks to whom Use the three letter identifier given in the par ticipants header to identify the addressees MOT be quiet add ALI BEA In this example Mother is telling Alice and Beatrice to be quiet Alternate transcription tier alt This tier is used to provide an alternative possible transcription If the transcription is intended to provide an alternative for only one word it may be better to use the main line form of this coding tier in the form text CHAT Manual 80 Coding Tier cod This is the general
16. Eds Linguistic categorization pp 195 242 Philadelphia Benjamins MacWhinney B amp Osser H 1977 Verbal planning functions in children s speech Child Development 48 978 985 Malvern D D Richards B J Chipere N amp Pur n P 2004 Lexical diversity and language development New York Palgrave Macmillan CHAT Manual 116 Miller J amp Chapman R 1983 SALT Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts User s Manual Madison WI University of Wisconsin Press Moerk E 1983 The mother of Eve as a first language teacher Norwood N J ABLEX Ninio A Snow C E Pan B amp Rollins P 1994 Classifying communicative acts in children s interactions Journal of Communication Disorders 27 157 188 Ninio A amp Wheeler P 1986 A manual for classifying verbal communicative acts in mother infant interaction Transcript Analysis 3 1 83 Ochs E 1979 Transcription as theory In E Ochs amp B Schieffelin Eds Developmental pragmatics pp 43 72 New York Academic Ochs E A Schegloff M amp Thompson S A 1996 Interaction and grammar Cambridge Cambridge University Press Oshima Takane Y amp MacWhinney B 1995 Japanese CHAT Manual Tokyo Tokyo University Press Parisse C amp Le Normand M T 2000 Automatic disambiguation of the morphosyntax in spoken language corpora Behavior Research Methods Instruments and Computers 32 468 481 Parrish
17. For example the Spanish word damelo can be represented as vimpsh da 2S amp IMP pro clit 1S pro clit OBJ amp EMASC give This word group is a series of three words verb postclitic postclitic combined by the marker Clitics may be either preclitics or postclitics Separable prefixes of the type found in German or Hungarian and other discontinuous morphemes can be represented as word groups using the preclitic delimiter as in this example for ausgegangen gone prep aus PART v geh amp PAST PART go Note the difference between the coding of the preclitic aus and the prefix ge in this example Compounds are also represented as combinations as in this analysis of angel fish n n angel n fish Here the first characters n represent the part of speech of the whole compound and the subsequent tags after each plus sign are for the parts of speech of the components of the compound Proper nouns are not treated as compounds Therefore they take forms with underlines instead of pluses such as Luke Skywalker or New York City 15 3 Words Beneath the level of the word group is the level of the word The structure of each individual word is prefix part of speech stem amp fusionalsuffix suffix english optional underscore joins words CHAT Manual 107 There can be any number of prefixes fusional suffixes and suffixes but there should be only one stem Prefixes and suffixes should be given in
18. Mommy I don t like this gt lt SAR it is nasty Using these overlap indicators does not preclude making a visual indication of overlap in the following way MOT no Sarah you have to lt stop doing that gt gt SAR lt Mommy I don t like this gt lt SAR it is nasty CLAN ignores the series of spaces treating them as if they were a single space Overlap Precedes I lt The overlap precedes symbol indicates that the text enclosed in angle brackets is being said at the same time as the preceding speaker s bracketed speech This code must be used in combination with the overlap follows symbol Sometimes several overlaps occur in a single sentence It is then necessary to use numbers to identify these overlaps as in this example SAR and the lt doggy was gt gt 1 really cute and it lt had to go gt gt 2 into bed MOT why don t you lt 1 MOT maybe we could lt 2 CHAT Manual 73 If this sort of intense overlapping continues it may be necessary to continue to increment the numbers as long as needed to keep everything straight However once one whole turn passes with no overlaps the number counters can be reinitialized to 1 Sometimes it is necessary to break up the standard flow of the interaction in order to code utterances on separate lines For example the following transcription is not legal in CHAT SAR I EXP that s great SAR bought
19. System CHILDES Project was first conceived researchers basically thought of computer systems as large notepads Although researchers were aware of the ways in which databases could be searched and tabulated the full analytic and comparative power of the computer systems themselves was not yet fully understood Rather than serving only as an archive or historical record a focus on a shared data base can lead to advances in methodology and theory However to achieve these additional advances researchers first needed to move beyond the idea of a simple data repository At first the possibility of utilizing shared transcription formats shared codes and shared analysis programs shone only as a faint glimmer on the horizon against the fog and gloom of handwritten tallies fuzzy dittos and idiosyncratic coding schemes Slowly against this backdrop the idea of a computerized data exchange system began to emerge It was against this conceptual background that CHILDES the name uses a one syllable pronunciation was conceived The origin of the system can be traced back to the summer of 1981 when Dan Slobin Willem Levelt Susan Ervin Tripp and Brian MacWhinney discussed the possibility of creating an archive for typed handwritten and computerized transcripts to be located at the Max Planck Institut fiir Psycholinguistik in Nijmegen In 1983 the MacArthur Foundation funded meetings of developmental researchers in which Elizabeth Bates Bria
20. USA is be written as U S A In this case the first letter is capitalized in order to mark it as a proper noun Other examples include M I T C MU M T V E T I U C three P O R two D two and K Mart The recommended way of transcribing the common name for television is just tv This form is not capitalized since it is not a proper noun Similarly we can write cd vcr tv and dvd The underscore is the best mark for combinations that are not true compounds such as m and m s for the M amp M candy Acronyms that are not actually spelled out when produced in conversation should be written as words Thus UNESCO would be written as Unesco The capitalization of the first letter is used to indicate the fact that it is a proper noun There must be no periods inside acronyms and titles because these can be confused with utterance delimiters 6 6 5 Numbers and Titles Numbers should be written out in words For example the number 256 could be written as two hundred and fifty six two hundred fifty six two five six or two fifty six depending on how it was pronounced It is best to use the form fifty six rather than fifty six because the hyphen is used in CHAT to indicate morphemicization If you want to emphasize the fact that a number is a single lexical item you can treat it as a compound using the form twothundred and fifty six However if you do this it will be more difficult to search for uses of a particular digit
21. addiion xxx a_ unintelligible Qa Gb babbling child invented form i interjection interaction uhhuh i p Irt d af Em 1 1 cn o p Gn neologism breaked n broke dia family specific form general special form gonggaQg fam n let n let neo on dog barking phonol consistent form aga p phon metalinguistic use no if q s or but q s when citing words second language form Q si singing lalala si singing u Unibettranscription binga u wmi CUWD word pla goobarumba wp wp Excluded words User defined code __word x rtfd__ __anyusercode We can define these special markers in the following ways l Addition can be used to mark an unintelligible string as a word for inclusion on the mor line MOR then recognizes xxx a as w xxx It also recognizes xxx a n as for example n xxx Babbling can be used to mark both low level early babbling and high level sound play in older children These forms have no obvious meaning and are used just to have fun with sound Child invented forms are words created by the child sometimes from other words without obvious derivational morphology Sometimes they appear to be sound variants of other words Sometimes their origin is obscure However the child appears to be convinced that they have meaning and adults sometimes come to use these forms themselves CHAT Manual 39 10
22. allow the transcriber to represent words and babbling words phonologically on the main line and have CLAN treat them as full lexical items This should only be done when the analysis requires that the phonological string be treated as a word and it is unclear which standard morpheme corresponds to the word If a phonological string should not be treated as a full word it should be marked by a beginning amp and the b Qu or w endings should not be used Also if the transcript includes a complete opho line for each word and the data are intended for phonological analysis it is better to use yy see the next section on the main line and then give the phonological form on the pho line If you wish to omit coding of an item on the pho line you can insert the horizontal ellipsis character Unicode 2026 This is a single character not three periods and it is not the ellipsis character used by MS Word Family specific forms are special words used only by the family These are often de rived from child forms that are adopted by all family members They also include certain caregiverese forms that are not easily recognized by the majority of adult speakers but which may be common to some areas or some families Family specific forms can be used by either adults or children The n marker is intended for morphological neologisms and over regularizations whereas the c marker is intended to mark nonce creation of stems Of course this dis
23. also warn other researchers about limitations on the use of the data For example if an investigator paid no attention to correct transcription of speech errors this should be noted 4 Pseudonyms The readme file should also include information on whether infor mants gave informed consent for the use of their data and whether pseudonyms have been used to preserve informant anonymity In general real names should be replaced by pseudonyms Anonymization is not necessary when the subject of the transcriptions is the researcher s own child as long as the child grants permission for the use of the data 5 History There should be detailed information on the history of the project How was funding obtained What were the goals of the project How was data col CHAT Manual 23 lected What was the sampling procedure How was transcription done What was ignored in transcription Were transcribers trained Was reliability checked Was coding done What codes were used Was the material computerized How 6 Codes If there are project specific codes these should be described 7 Biographical data Where possible extensive demographic dialectological and psychometric data should be provided for each informant There should be information on topics such as age gender siblings schooling social class oc cupation previous residences religion interests friends and so forth Informa tion on where the parents grew up and the various residen
24. although the form is collocational it does not obey standard rules of compound formation Because these forms all begin with a capital letter the morphological analyzer will recognize them as proper nouns The CHAT Manual 46 underscore is used for two other purposes First it can be used for irregular combinations such as how about and how come Second it can be used on the mor line to represent a multiword English gloss for a single stem as in lose_ flowers for defleurir Because the dash is used on the mor line to indicate suffixation it is important to avoid confusion between the standard use of the dash in compounds such as blue green and the use of the dash in CHAT To do this use the compound marker to replace the dash or hyphen as in blue green instead of blue green 6 6 3 Capitalization In general capitals are only allowed at the beginnings of words However they can also occur later in a word in these cases if the Options tier includes sign or CA If u is used at the end of the word After the symbol After the _ underscore symbol The word is listed on the Exceptions tier The capital letter is preceded by prefix like Mac which is specified in the depfile in UPREFS Mac code Chan 6 6 4 Acronyms Acronyms should be transcribed by using the component letters as a part of a linked form In compounds the g marking is not used since it would make the acronym unreadable Thus
25. analysis it is best to transcribe these shortenings using the parenthesis notation as follows Table 11 Abbreviations in Dutch Lx oe Gk oe T m hom es ees rf ox tn een Lb m th ns eens wa j wat pin orn da j daD E raf ejaf west geweest pee a ruit e ruit top up 5 lj O Some forms that should probably remain with their standard apostrophes include smorgens sochtends savonds snachts and the apostrophe s plural form CHAT Manual 55 7 Utterances The basic units of CHAT transcription are the morpheme the word and the utterance In addition some transcribers may be interested in marking tone units In the previous two chapters we examined principles for transcribing words and morphemes In this chapter we examine ways of delimiting utterances and tone units 71 One Utterance or Many Early child language is rich with repetitions For example a child may often say the same word or group of words eight times in a row without changes The CHAT system provides mechanisms for coding these repetitions into single utterances However at the earliest stages it may be misleading to try to compact these multiple attempts into a single line Consider fie alternative ways of transcribing a series of repeated words 1 Simple transcription of the words as sever
26. at bedtime CHI milk Or the child may use a single utterance repeatedly but each time with a slightly different purpose For example when putting together a puzzle the child may pick up a piece and ask CHI where does this piece go This may happen nine times in succession In both of these examples it seems unfair from a discourse point of view to treat each utterance as a mere repetition Instead each is functioning independently as a full communication One may want to mark the fact that the lexical material is repeated but this should not affect other quantitative measures 7 3 Basic Utterance Terminators The basic CHAT utterance terminators are the period the question mark and the exclamation mark CHAT requires that there be only one utterance on each main line In order to mark this each utterance must end with one of these three utterance terminators It is possible to use the comma on the main line but it is not treated as a terminator However a single main line utterance may extend for several computer lines as in this example CHAT Manual 58 CHI this MOT if this is the one you want you will have to take your spoon out of the other one The utterance in this main tier extends for two lines in the computer file When it is nec essary to continue an utterance on the main tier onto a second line the second line must begin with a tab CLAN is set to expect no more than 2000 characters in each main line
27. before the mark If the error is in the second part of the retracing the symbol goes after the In error coding the form actually produced is placed on the main line and the target form is given on the err line The full system for error coding is presented in a separate chapter 6 6 Initial and Final Codes The symbols we have discussed so far in this chapter usually refer to words or groups of words CHAT also allows for codes that refer to entire utterances These codes are CHAT Manual 76 placed into square brackets either at the beginning of the utterance or after the final utterance delimiter They always begin with a sign Postcodes text Postcodes are symbols placed into square brackets at the end of the utterance They should include the plus sign and a space after the left bracket There is no predefined set of postcodes Instead postcodes can be designed to fit the needs of your particular project Unlike scoped codes postcodes must apply to the whole utterance as in this example CHI not this one neg req inc Postcodes are helpful in including or excluding utterances from analyses of turn length or utterance length by MLT and MLU The postcodes bch and trn when combined with the s and s switch can be used for this purpose When the SALTIN command translates codes from SALT format to CHAT format it treats them as postcodes because the scope of codes is not usually defined in SA
28. code GEO Age y m d 3 16 22 Sex Unknown vi Male Female Group Urban Social economic Lower Role Participant Education Unique file ID Optional speaker name George Required fields Here are some further characterizations of the possible fields for the ID header Language as in Table 1 above Corpus a one word label for the corpus in lowercase Code the three letter code for the speaker in capitals Age the age of the speaker see below Sex either male or female in lowercase Group any single word label SES any single word label Role the role as given in the Participants line Education educational level of the speaker Custom any additional information needed for a given project It is important to use the correct format for the Target Child s age This field uses the form years months days as in 2 11 17 for 2 years 11 months and 17 days If you want to represent a range of several days for a given transcript you can use this format 2 11 17 2 11 28 Note that the dash is surrounded by spaces If you do not know the child s age in days you can simply use years and months as in 6 4 with a period after the months If you do not know the months you can use the form 6 with the semicolon after the years If you only know the child s birthdate and the date of the transcript you can use the DATES program to compute the child s age Media CHAT Manual 30 This header is used to tell CLA
29. distant objects and persons ab stract matters excluding inner states past actions and events discussing the related to to discuss nonobservable attributes of objects or per present sons present in the environment or to discuss past or future events related to those referents sentiments nonobservable thoughts and feelings MRK marking to express socially expected sentiments on specific occasions such as thanking apologizing or to mark some event separation NFA to negotiate actions and activities in the far future the future NIA negotiating the imme to negotiate the initiation continuation ending and diate activity stopping of activities and acts to direct hearer s and speaker s acts to allocate roles moves and turns in joint activities addressed to present hearer to establish mutual attentiveness and proximity or tion withdrawal PRO to perform moves in a game or other activity by ut g the appropriate verbal forms to discuss who is the possessor of an object objects to the hearer reading written text to read or recite written text aloud OOO unintelligible to mark unintelligible utterances uninterpretable to mark uninterpretable utterances 13 2 Illocutionary Force Codes Directives AC Answer calls show attentiveness to communications AD Agree to carry out an act requested or proposed by other AL Agree to do something for the last time CL Call attention to hearer by name or by substitute excl
30. double s as in kniveses m m morphophonological error as in knifes for knives f formal lexical device f a 0 d article should be zero used the f a 0 1 article should be zero used a f a d article should be definite used indefinite fai article should be indefinite used definite fp part of speech wrong as in mine for my also part of speech errors involving derivations such as assess gt assessment 0 missing word or part of speech Oart 0aux Odoes etc For agrammatic and jargon aphasic speech it is often best to avoid trying to guess at what is missing and to just mark incomplete utterances with the postcode gram 14 2 Word level coding details e When the error is a real word even though it is the wrong real word the target should be marked with the special replacement form using a double colon as in it was singing ringing s r p w in my ears CHAT Manual 101 p Doing this allows the MOR program to use the actual word produced rather than the target in its analysis but also allows programs such as FREQ to use either form when needed Multiple codes may be used if an error is for example both a semantic and phonemic paraphasia as in this example it was singing ringing s r p w in my ears Also if the error is repeated add rep to the error code if the error is revised to another error or the correct word add ret to the error co
31. file This line appears at the beginning of the file and its presence is hidden in the CLAN editor When this header is missing CLAN tries to determine which font is most appropriate for use with the current file by examining information in the Languages and WOptions headers If CLAN s choice is not appropriate for the file then the user will have to change the font After this is done the font information will be stored in this header line Files that are retrieved CHAT Manual 25 from the database often do not have this header included thereby allowing CLAN and the user to decide which font is most appropriate for viewing the current file UTF8 This hidden header follows after the Font header All files in the database use this header to mark the fact that they are encoded in UTF8 If the file was produced outside of CLAN and this header is missing CLAN will complain and ask the user to verify whether the file should be read in UTF8 Often this means that the user should run the CP2UTF program to convert the file to UTF8 5 2 Initial Headers CHAT has seven initial headers The first six of these Begin Languages Participants Options ID and Media appear in this order as the first lines of the file The last one End appears at the end of the file as the last line Begin This header is always the first visible header placed at the beginning of the file It is needed to guarantee that no material h
32. files into one collection for each child This can be done just by creating file names that begin with the three letter code for the child as in lea001 cha or evel5 cha Each collection of files from the children involved in a given study constitutes a corpus A corpus can also be composed of a group of files from different groups of speakers when the focus is on a cross sectional sampling of larger numbers of language learners from various age groups In either case each corpus should have a documentation file This readme file should contain a basic set of facts that are indispensable for the proper interpretation of the data by other researchers The minimum set of facts that should be in each readme file are the following 1 Acknowledgments There should be a statement that asks the user to cite some particular reference when using the corpus For example researchers using the Adam Eve and Sarah corpora from Roger Brown and his colleagues are asked to cite Brown 1973 In addition all users can cite this current manual as the source for the CHILDES system in general 2 Restrictions If the data are being contributed to the CHILDES system contrib utors can set particular restrictions on the use of their data For example re searchers may ask that they be sent copies of articles that make use of their data Many researchers have chosen to set no limitations at all on the use of their data 3 Warnings This documentation file should
33. gem markers because they are easier to use than the bg and eg markers To use this feature you need to also use the n switch in GEM You may nest at most one Bg Eg pair inside a series of G headers New Episode This header simply marks the fact that there has been a break in the recording and that a new episode has started It is a bare header that is used without a colon because it takes no entry There is no need to mark the end of the episode because the New Episode header indicates both the end of one episode and the beginning of another New Language This header is used to indicate the shift from the initially most frequent language listed in the Languages header to a new most frequent language This header should only be used when there is a marked break in a transcript from the use of one language to a fairly uniform use of another language Page This header is used to indicate the page from which some text is taken It should not be used for spoken texts Situation CHAT Manual 35 This changeable header describes the general setting of the interaction It applies to all the material that follows it until a new Situation header appears The entry for this header is a standard description of the situation Try to use standard situations such as breakfast outing bath working visiting playmates school or getting ready to go out Here is an example of the complete
34. home soon aren t you The other satellite marker can be used to separate off initial vocatives or topics in topic comment languages It is entered using the F2 v combination Here is an example MOT Mom you re coming home soon aren t you Both of these satellite markers should be surrounded by spaces since they will be treated as separate word forms by MOR and GRASP 7 5 Separators CHAT allows for the use of several conventional punctuation features that have no formal role in the transcription system We call these separators and distinguish them from terminators which have a formal role and the various CA intonation marks Comma The comma is used widely throughout CHAT transcripts to represent a combination of features such as pause syntactic juncture intonational drop and others Although it has no formal definition or systematic characterization it is fine to use this symbol The use of comma to mark level intonation in CA is replaced by the use of the mark Semicolon The semicolon is used primarily to mark syntactic structures in corpora such as the SCOTUS oral arguments from the Supreme Court Most conversational transcripts do not need to use this mark The use of semicolon to mark a light final drop in CA is replaced by the use of the mark N Colon The colon is used within words to mark lengthening In order to use it as a separator it must be surrounded by spaces Other Transcriber
35. into the CHAT manual you will want to walk through the tutorial section at the beginning of the CHAT manual After finishing the tutorial try working a bit with each of the CLAN commands to get a feel for the overall scope of the system You can then learn more about CHAT by transcribing a small sample of your data in a short test file Run the CHECK program at frequent intervals to verify the accuracy of your coding Once you have finished transcribing a small segment of your data try out the various analysis programs you plan to use to make sure that they provide the types of results you need for your work If you are primarily interested in analyzing data already stored in the CHILDES archive you do not need to learn the CHAT transcription format in much detail and you will only need to use the editor to open and read files In that case you may wish to focus your efforts on learning to use the CLAN programs If you plan to transcribe new data then you also need to work with the current manual to learn to use CHAT Teachers will also want to pay particular attention to the sections of the CLAN manual that present a tutorial introduction Using some of the examples given there you can construct additional materials to encourage students to explore the database to test out particular hypotheses At the end of the CLAN manual there are also a series of exercises that help students further consolidate their knowledge of CHAT and CLAN The CHIL
36. is sung it is best to transcribe it as speech and just mark it as being sung through a comment line Test words are nonce forms generated by the investigators to test the productivity of the child s grammar CHAT Manual 40 20 Unibet transcription can be given on the main line by using the Qu marker However if many such forms are being noted it may be better to construct a pho line With the advent of IPA Unicode we now prefer to avoid the use of Unibet relying instead directly on IPA 21 Word play in older children produces forms that may sound much like the forms of babbling but which arise from a slightly different process It is best to use the b for forms produced by children younger than 2 0 and wp for older children 22 Unknown forms can be marked with x However usually unknown forms are transcribed using the xx xxx yy yyy and www markers 23 User defined special forms can be marked with z followed by up to five letters of a user defined code such as in word z rftd This format should be used carefully because it will be difficult for the MOR program to evaluate words with these codes unless additional detailed information is added to the sf cut file Later in this chapter we present a set of standard spellings of English words that make use of Qd fp and i largely unnecessary However in languages where such a list is not available it may be necessary to use forms with d or i The Wb Qu and wp markers
37. isot Veo Ese pb eV Vo ee PE A bore oso ootis 68 8 1 Audio and Video Time Marks ese estt eee nt eese e bua e e RE ES ANNE BARRE 68 8 2 Paralinguistic Scoping and Events essere enne 69 8 3 Explanations and Alternatives eise entree etse on sete o NE erue e FER ee eR sates To Cena 69 84 Retracing Overlap and Clauses entre tete thin etn epa Un SR eR neos ee og Rn 72 BO EDEOISMTIHTS rora e bv ea huie E E aime R i cha ae ae seventeen aes 75 55 itr and Final Codes stad oet e ver lon astu de S and isas ete 75 9 Dependent Tiers ines eese oec ties en cop bet ei Eolo ne PERS voee Pe a tes oos CE PEN CGU Eo etu esses easet ie Dav apso Sioe 78 9 Standard Dependent Tiets eue ede oth ee psp edel aes born Gee sen ERN e epe RE 78 92 Synchrony Relations tee enteras Re alebat ae esee e A Des tradas 84 10 CHAT CA Transcription icicccisscsasiecssicccusoscccesboensssepnescsoncdabessopbesenspensoussnneseabuessenase 86 CHAT Manual 4 TI Arabic Transcription suere res hires eteor et eps eerte ers r nve ruo steed iante sesoses esie 89 12 Specific Applications eer 91 I2 X008 AA O a TE aE aap ay EE ETEA E E E HERAUS 91 12 2 Elicited Narratives and Picture Descriptions esee 92 I ER ICI AAS Me ERES 92 124 Children With DISFIelele ss ieri neninn DD RETO RO DRE 93 13 Speech Act EDIT 95 I5 T Aantercha nge Vey pes ss cacccecee toi ape aO E Ne o Pee at e EU do o Ede 95 13 2 Illocutionary
38. level spelling errors not to code any higher level grammatical errors or word omissions Also the words on the main line are all given in their standard target language orthographic form For clarity final punctuation on the main line is preceded by a space If a punctuation mark is omitted it is coded with a zero Forms that appear on the spe line that have no role in the main line such as extraneous punctuation are marked with an asterisk These conventions focus on the writing of individual words However it may also be necessary to note larger features of composition When the student crosses off a series of words and rewrites them you can use the standard CHAT conventions for retracing with scoping marked by angle brackets and the symbol If you want to mark page breaks you can use a header such as Stim Page 3 If you wish to mark a shift in ink or orthographic style you can use a general Comment field 12 4 Children With Disfluencies Bernstein Ratner Rooney and MacWhinney 1996 have proposed a specific set of CHAT adaptations that are designed to facilitate the study of children with disfluencies The major modifications to standard coding include 1 The use of a notation of the form ba amp nana nana to explicitly code the fact that the second syllable of the word banana is repeated three times The addition of this material has little effect on the running of particular CLAN program 2 Asimilar form for multi
39. name products The Negative marker is the word not which is tagged neg not Numbers are labelled num for cardinal numbers The ordinal numbers are adjectives Particles are words that are often also prepositions but are serving as verbal particles Prepositions are labelled prep When classifying a word as a preposition make sure that it is part of a prepositional phrase When a preposition is not a part of a phrase it should be coded as a particle or an adverb Quantifiers include each every all some and similar items CHAT Manual 114 References Allen G D 1988 The PHONASCII system Journal of the International Phonetic Association 16 9 25 Ament W 1899 Die Entwicklung von Sprechen und Denken beim Kinder Leipzig Ernst Wunderlich Augustine S 1952 The Confessions Vol Volume 18 Chicago Encyclopedia Britannica Bates E amp MacWhinney B 1982 Functionalist approaches to grammar In E Wanner amp L Gleitman Eds Language acquisition The state of the art pp 173 218 New York Cambridge University Press Bernstein Ratner N Rooney B amp MacWhinney B 1996 Analysis of stuttering using CHILDES and CLAN Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics 10 169 187 Bloom L amp Lahey M 1973 Language development and language disorders New York John Wiley amp Sons Bloom L Lightbown P amp Hood L 1975 Structure and variation in child language Monographs of the S
40. not important Although CHAT provides transcribers with the option of indicating the point of events using the Vocom tier and lt bef gt and lt aft gt scoping it may often be best to use the Comment header tier instead The advantage of using the Comment header is that it CHAT Manual 85 indicates in a clearer manner the point at which an activity actually occurs For example instead of the form MOT it is her turn S act lt bef gt moves to the door one could use the form Comment Mot moves to the door MOT it is her turn The third option provided by CHAT is to code comments in square brackets right on the main line as in this form MOT Mot moves to the door it is her turn Of these alternative forms the second seems to be the best in this case Scope on Main Tier sc n When you want a particular dependent tier to refer to a particular word on the main tier you can use this additional code to mark the scope For example here the code marks the fact that the mother s words 4 through 7 are imitated by the child MOT want to come sit in my lap CHI sit in my lap Sact sc 4 7 S IMIT CHAT Manual 86 10 CHAT CA Transcription CHAT also allows transcription that is more closely in accord with the requirements of CA Conversational Analysis transcription CA is a system devised by Sacks Schegloff and Jefferson Sacks Schegloff amp Jefferson 1974 for the purpose of understanding the construc
41. pParticipants This field identifies the speakers e ges dependent tiers such as Yoges spa can be added as needed Gail Jefferson continually elaborate the coding of CA features through special marks during her career Her creation of new marks was limited for many years by what was available on the typewriter With the advent of Unicode we are able to capture all of the marks she had proposed along with others that she occasionally used The following table summarizes these marks of CHAT CA Character Name up arrow down arrow double arrow tilted up single arrow tilted up level arrow single arrow tilted down double arrow down infinity mark double wavy equals triple wavy equals triple equal raised period open bracket top close bracket top open bracket bottom closed bracket bottom up triangle down triangle low asterisk double question mark degree sign fisheye low bar high bar smiley double integral upsilon with dialytika clockwise integral section marker tilde half circle capital H with dasia OQ har Function X D AN ES COM qq ok b pb c o mc 2mm lt amp shift to high pitch shift to low pitch rising to high rising to mid level falling to mid falling to low unmarked ending no break continuation Z technical continuation uptake internal inhalation top begin overlap top end overlap bottom begin overlap bottom end overlap AfasterA
42. part of speech with the sign can also be used without the gs Tone languages like Cantonese Mandarin and Thai are allowed to have word forms that include tones and numbers for polysemes Participants This is the third visible header Like the Begin and Participants headers it is obligatory It lists all of the actors within the file The format for this header is XXX Name Role XXX Name Role XXX Name Role XXX stands for the three letter speaker ID Here is an example of a completed Participants header line CHAT Manual 27 Participants SAR Sue Day Target Child CAR Carol Mother Participants are identified by three elements their speaker ID their name and their role l Speaker ID The speaker ID is usually composed of three letters The code may be based either on the participant s name as in ROS or BIL or on her role as in CHI or MOT In this type of identifying system several different children could be indicated as CH1 CH2 CH3 and so on Speaker IDs must be unique because they will be used to identify speakers both in the main body of the transcript and in other headers In many transcripts three letters are enough to distinguish all speakers However even with three letters some ambiguities can arise For example suppose that the child being studied is named Mark MAR and his mother is named Mary MAR They would both have the same speaker ID and you would not be able to tell who was talking So
43. seem as acceptable as the standard spellings These include altho for standard although donut for doughnut tho for though thru for through and abc s for abcs Transcribers should use the standard spellings for these words In general it is best to avoid the use of CHAT Manual 51 monomorphemic words with apostrophes For example it is better to use the form mam than the form ma am However apostrophes must be used in English for multimorphemic contractions such as m or don t 6 6 12 Colloquial Forms Colloquial and slang forms are often listed in the dictionary Examples include telly for television and rad for radical The following table lists some such colloquial forms with their corresponding standard forms Words that are marked with an asterisk cannot be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Table 7 Colloquial Forms 6 6 13 Dialectal Variations Other variant pronunciations such as dat for that involve standard dialectal sound substitutions without deletions Unfortunately using these forms can make lexical retrieval very difficult For example a researcher interested in the word together will seldom remember to include tagether in the search string There are four ways to deal with this problem The first is to add each variant form to the Olexicon cdc file which also contains other nonstandard forms Because these variant forms are in nearly all cases nonhomographic with other words researchers analy
44. segments and treat it as a single utterance when a segment with is followed by on the next utterance Interruption of a Question A If the utterance that is being interrupted has the shape of a question then this symbol should be used Self Interruption Some researchers wish to be able to distinguish between incompletions involving a trailing off and incompletions involving an actual self interruption When an incompletion is not followed by further material from the same speaker the symbol should always be selected However when the speaker breaks off an utterance and starts up another the symbol can be used as in this example SAR smells good enough for SAR what is that There is no hard and fast way of distinguishing cases of trailing off from self interrup tion For this reason some researchers prefer to avoid making the distinction Researchers who wish to avoid making the distinction should use only the symbol Self Interrupted Question If the utterance being self interrupted is a question you can use the symbol Transcription Break d It is often convenient to break utterances at phrasal boundaries in order to mark overlaps When this is done the first segment is ended with the terminator as in this example SAR smells good enough for me MOT but SAR if I could have some MOT why would you want it CHAT Manual 66 Quotation 1 and For
45. sets Eventually these new data sets will be available to other researchers as a part of the growing CHILDES database In this way CHAT CLAN and the database function as a coarticulated set of complementary tools There are manuals for each of the three CHILDES tools The CHAT manual which you are now reading describes the conventions and principles of CHAT transcription The CLAN manual describes the use of the CLAN computer programs that you can use to transcribe annotate and analyze language interactions The third manual which is actually a collection of over a dozen separate manuals retrievable from a single link on the web describes the data files in the CHILDES database Each of these database manuals describes the data sets in one major component of the database In addition there is a short manual that provides an overview for the entire database 2 7 Shaping CHAT We received a great deal of extremely helpful input during the years between 1984 and 1988 when the CHAT system was being formulated Some of the most detailed comments came from George Allen Elizabeth Bates Nan Bernstein Ratner Giuseppe Cappelli Annick De Houwer Jane Desimone Jane Edwards Julia Evans Judi Fenson CHAT Manual 10 Paul Fletcher Steven Gillis Kristen Keefe Mary MacWhinney Jon Miller Barbara Pan Lucia Pfanner Kim Plunkett Kelley Sacco Catherine Snow Jeff Sokolov Leonid Spektor Joseph Stemberger Frank Wijnen and Antonio Zampolli Co
46. that treatment of words as separate utterances in the earliest stages of language acquisition tends to underestimate the level of syntactic control being achieved by the child Branigan 1979 Elbers amp Wijnen 1993 CLAN provides a partial solution to this dilemma In cases where the researcher wants to use separate utterances for each word the commands will treat each utterance as having a single morpheme If the fourth form of transcription with repetition marks is used the commands will by default treat the utterance as having only one morpheme However there is an option that allows the user to override this default and treat each word as a separate morpheme This then allows the researcher to compute two different MLU values The analysis with repetitions excluded could be viewed as the one that emphasizes syntactic structure and the one with repetitions included could be viewed as the one that emphasizes productivity measures The example we have been discussing involves a simple case of word repetition In other cases researchers may want to group together nonrepeated words for which there is only partial evidence of syntactic or semantic combination Consider the contrast between these next two examples In the first example the presence of the conjunction and motivates treatment of the words as a syntactic combination CHI red yellow blue and white However without the conjunction the words are best treated as separ
47. the left occur in text they are treated as separate lexical items and are mapped to forms such as beglbeg on the mor tier The end marker is used to mark postposed forms such as tags and sentence final particles The beg marker is used to mark preposed forms such as vocatives and communicators The bq marks the beginning of a quote and the eq marks the end of a quote These special characters are important for correctly structuring the dependency relations for the GRASP program 15 10 Sample Morphological Tagging for English The following table describes and illustrates a more detailed set of word class codings for English The mor tier examples correspond to the labellings MOR produces for the words in question It is possible to augment or simplify this set either by creating additional word categories or by adding additional fields to the part of speech label as discussed previously The entries in this table and elsewhere in this manual can always be double checked against the current version of the MOR grammar by typing mor xi to bring up interactive MOR and then entering the word to be analyzed Table 50 Word Classes for English CHAT Manual 112 adi big SP adilgood amp SP conj subjif conj sub although Eme C CIN UR n prop Mar det num two prol pro me pro we prolus pro refl myself verb present participle walking running CHAT Manual 113 Since it is sometimes difficult to decide what par
48. the material is coded in this way CLAN will count only one utterance If the coder wishes to treat the fragment as a separate utterance the and symbols that were discussed on page 64 should be used instead By default all of the clan programs except mlu mlt and modrep include repeated material This default can be changed by using the r6 switch Unclear Retracing Type This symbol is used primarily when reformatting SALT files to CHAT files using the SALTIN command SALT does not distinguish between filled pausing repetitions D and retracings all three phenomena and possible others are treated as mazes Because of this SALTIN uses the 7 symbol to translate SALT mazes into chat hesitation markings Clause Delimiter c If you wish to conduct analyses such as MLU and MLT based on clauses rather than utterances as the basic unit of analysis you should mark the end of each clause with this symbol It is not necessary to mark the scope of this symbol since it is assumed to apply to all the material before it up to the beginning of the utterance or up to the preceding c marker 8 5 Error Marking Errors are marked by placing the symbol after the error Usually the marker occurs right after the error However if there is a replacement string such as because that should come first In repetitions and retracing with errors in the initial part of the retracing the symbol is placed
49. the order in which they occur in the word Since fusional suffixes are fused parts of the stem their order is indeterminate The English translation of the stem is not a part of the morphology but is included for convenience for non native speakers If the English translation requires two words these words should be joined by an underscore as in lose flowers for French defleurir Now let us look in greater detail at the nature of each of these types of coding Throughout this discussion bear in mind that all coding is done on a word by word basis where words are considered to be strings separated by spaces 15 4 Part of Speech Codes The morphological codes on the mor line begin with a part of speech code The basic scheme for the part of speech code is category subcategory subcategory Additional fields can be added using the colon character as the field separator The subcategory fields contain information about syntactic features of the word that are not marked overtly For example you may wish to code the fact that Italian andare is an intransitive verb even though there is no single morpheme that signals intransitivity You can do this by using the part of speech code v intrans rather than by inserting a separate morpheme In order to avoid redundancy information that is marked by a prefix or suffix is not incorporated into the part of speech code as this information will be found to the right of the delimiter These c
50. with a carriage return 2 The first line in the file must be an Begin header line 3 The second line in the file must be an Languages header line The languages entered here use a three letter ISO 639 3 code such as eng for English 4 The third line must be an Participants header line listing three letter codes for each participant the participant s name and the participant s role 5 After the Participants header come a set of ID headers providing further details for each speaker These will be inserted automatically for you when you run CHECK using escape L 6 The last line in the file must be an End header line 7 Lines beginning with indicate what was actually said These are called main lines Each main line should code one and only one utterance When a speaker produces several utterances in a row code each with a new main line 8 After the asterisk on the main line comes a three letter code in upper case letters for the participant who was the speaker of the utterance being coded After the three letter code comes a colon and then a tab 9 What was actually said is entered starting in the ninth column 10 Lines beginning with the symbol can contain codes and commentary regarding what was said They are called dependent tier lines The symbol is followed by a three letter code in lowercase letters for the dependent tier type such as pho for phonology a colon and then a tab The text of the depe
51. you must change one speaker ID You would probably want to change it to something that would be easy to read and understand as you go through the file A good choice is to use that speaker s role In this example Mary s speaker ID would be changed to MOT Mother You could change Mark s speaker ID to CHI but that would be misleading if there are other children in the transcript So a better solution would be to use MAR and MOT as shown in the following example Participants MAR Mark Target Child MOT Mary Mother 2 Name The speaker s name can be omitted If CLAN finds only a three letter ID and a role it will assume that the name has been omitted In order to preserve anonymity it is often useful to include a pseudonym for the name because the pseudonym will also be used in the body of the transcript For clan to correctly parse the participants line multiple word name definitions such as Sue Day need to be joined in the form Sue Day Role After the ID and name you type in the role of the speaker There are a fixed set of roles specified in the depfile cut file used by CHECK and we recommend trying to use these fixed roles whenever possible Please consult that file for the full list You will also see this same list of possible roles in the role segment of the ID Headers dialog box All of these roles are hard wired into the depfile cut file used by CHECK If one of these standard roles does not work it would be b
52. 1978 Facial action coding system Investigator s guide Palo Alto CA Consulting Psychologists Press Elbers L amp Wijnen F 1993 Effort production skill and language learning In C Ferguson L Menn amp C Stoel Gammon Eds Phonological development pp 337 368 Timonium MD York Fletcher P 1985 A child s learning of English Oxford Blackwell CHAT Manual 115 Gerken L 1991 The metrical basis for children s subjectless sentences Journal of Memory and Language 30 431 451 Gerken L Landau B amp Remez R E 1990 Function morphemes in young children s speech perception and production Developmental Psychology 26 2 204 216 Goldman Eisler F 1968 Psycholinguistics Experiments in spontaneous speech New York Academic Press Gvozdev A N 1949 Formirovaniye u rebenka grammaticheskogo stroya Moscow Akademija Pedagogika Nauk RSFSR Halliday M 1966 Notes on transitivity and theme in English Part 1 Journal of Linguistics 2 37 71 Halliday M 1967 Notes on transitivity and theme in English Part 2 Journal of Linguistics 3 177 274 Halliday M 1968 Notes on transitivity and theme in English Part 3 Journal of Linguistics 4 153 308 Jefferson G 1984 Transcript notation In J Atkinson amp J Heritage Eds Structures of social interaction Studies in conversation analysis pp 134 162 Cambridge Cambridge University Press Kearney G amp McKenzie S
53. 1993 Machine interpretation of emotion Design of memory based expert system for interpreting facial expressions in terms of signaled emotions Cognitive Science 17 589 622 Kenyeres E 1926 A gyermek els szavai es a szofajok foll p se Budapest Kisdednevel s Kenyeres E 1938 Comment une petite hongroise de sept ans apprend le frangais Archives de Psychologie 26 521 566 Leopold W 1939 Speech development of a bilingual child a linguist s record Vol 1 Vocabulary growth in the first two years Vol 1 Evanston IL Northwestern University Press Leopold W 1947 Speech development of a bilingual child a linguist s record Vol 2 Sound learning in the first two years Evanston IL Northwestern University Press Leopold W 19492 Speech development of a bilingual child a linguist s record Vol 3 Grammar and general problems in the first two years Evanston IL Northwestern University Press Leopold W 1949b Speech development of a bilingual child a linguist s record Vol 4 Diary from age 2 Evanston IL Northwestern University Press LIPPS 2000 The LIDES manual A document for preparing and analysing language interaction data International Journal of Bilingualism 4 1 64 Low A A 1931 A case of agrammatism in the English language Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 25 556 569 MacWhinney B 1989 Competition and lexical categorization In R Corrigan F Eckman amp M Noonan
54. C b Situation Tier sit This tier describes situational information relevant only to the utterance There is also an Situation header Situational comments that relate more broadly to the file as a whole or to a major section of the file should be placed in a Situation header EVE what that EVE woof o woof o sit dog is barking Speech Act Tier Yospa This tier is for speech act coding Many researchers wish to transcribe their data with reference to speech acts Speech act codes describe the function of sentences in discourse Often researchers express a preference for the method of coding for speech acts Many systems for coding speech acts have been developed A set of speech act codes adapted from a more general system devised by Ninio and Wheeler is provided in the chapter on speech act coding Timing Tier Yotim This tier is for time stamp coding It should not be confused with the millisecond accurate timing found in the bullets inserted by sonic CHAT This tier is used just to CHAT Manual 84 mark large periods of time during the course of taping These readings are given relative to the time of the first utterance in the file The time of that utterance is taken to be time 00 00 00 Its absolute time value can be given by the Time Start header Elapsed time from the beginning of the file is given in hours minutes seconds Thus a tim entry of 01 20 55 indicates the passage of 1 hour 20 minutes and 55 seconds fro
55. CHILDES Project In 1988 the National Science Foundation provided an equipment grant that allowed us to put the database on the Internet and on CD ROMs From 1989 to 2010 the project has been supported by an ongoing grant from the National Institutes of Health NICHHD In 1998 the National Science Foundation Linguistics Program CHAT Manual 12 provided additional support to improve the programs for morphosyntactic analysis of the database In 1999 NSF funded the TalkBank project which seeks to improve the CHILDES tools and to use CHILDES as a model for other disciplines studying human communication In 2002 NSF provided support for the development of the GRASP system for parsing of the corpora In 2002 NIH provided additional support for the development of PhonBank for child language phonology and AphasiaBank for the study of communication in aphasia 2 12 How to Use These Manuals Each of the three parts of the CHILDES system is described in a separate manual The CHAT manual describes the conventions and principles of CHAT transcription The CLAN manual describes the use of the editor and the analytic commands The database manual is a set of over a dozen smaller documents each describing a separate segment of the database To learn the CHILDES system you should begin by downloading and installing the CLAN program Next you should download and start to read the current manual CHAT Manual and the CLAN manual Before proceeding too far
56. DES system was not intended to address all issues in the study of language learning or to be used by all students of spontaneous interactions The CHAT system is comprehensive but it is not ideal for all purposes The programs are powerful but they cannot solve all analytic problems It is not the goal of CHILDES to provide facilities for all research endeavors or to force all research into some uniform mold On the contrary the programs are designed to offer support for alternative analytic frameworks For example the editor now supports the various codes of Conversation Analysis CA format as alternatives and supplements to CHAT format CHAT Manual 13 There are many researchers in the fields that study language learning who will never need to use CHILDES Indeed we estimate that the three CHILDES tools will never be used by at least half of the researchers in the field of child language There are three com mon reasons why individual researchers may not find CHILDES useful l some researchers may have already committed themselves to use of another an alytic system 2 some researchers may have collected so much data that they can work for many years without needing to collect more data and without comparing their own data with other researchers data and 3 some researchers may not be interested in studying spontaneous speech data Of these three reasons for not needing to use the three CHILDES tools the third is the most frequent
57. For example researchers studying comprehension would only be interested in CHILDES data when they wish to compare findings arising from studies of comprehension with patterns occurring in spontaneous production 2 13 Changes The CHILDES tools have been extensively tested for ease of application accuracy and reliability However change is fundamental to any research enterprise Researchers are constantly pursuing better ways of coding and analyzing data It is important that the CHILDES tools keep progress with these changing requirements For this reason there will be revisions to CHAT the programs and the database as long as the CHILDES Project is active CHAT Manual 14 3 Principles The CHAT system provides a standardized format for producing computerized tran scripts of face to face conversational interactions These interactions may involve children and parents doctors and patients or teachers and second language learners Despite the differences between these interactions there are enough common features to allow for the creation of a single general transcription system The system described here is designed for use with both normal and disordered populations It can be used with learners of all types including children second language learners and adults recovering from aphasic disorders The system provides options for basic discourse transcription as well as detailed phonological and morphological analysis The system bears t
58. Force Ode Sida i bate nie Oto te odes bo Du tdi 96 14 Error Coding mee oen 99 14 1 Word level error codes summary eese eene enne enne nnne 99 14 2 Word level coding details taceo eee ente acento ee tob en ceat en is eius 100 14 3 Utterance level error coding post codes eene 103 15 Morphosyntactie Coding a cisccciicesisisencdcinccswoanssetesssedtnsvacesssvacossoevsdsuscassessseussssduass 105 15 1 One to one correspondence sssessssssessseeesseeesseessetssersseresseeesseessresseesseeessees 105 15 2 Tag Groups and Word Groups sessssssessseessseessseessressersserssseesseesseesseesseeesseee 106 15 3 WOrdS ot ea e E ERE a eere EEA a E ER 106 15 4 Part of Speech Codes iain eo te a N EENE eus duo 107 155v SEMS ette Te tss toU E eee ac ah ULL of esta etd 108 156 ATIKE o dpa bau ater indt pal aded a dte ics dM ds 109 aM Sli P rU 110 5 8 COnDOuIds uscito od ole dae ue ease t Be eee 110 15 9 Sample Morphological Tagging for English esee 111 REPO ENCES ois cccsisedicddisececcscsateccdessccocedeocacs cedscoccaveceecsesecescosesescscedscosssecccesscsdccscdcosesesices sce 114 CHAT Manual 5 2 Introduction Language acquisition research thrives on data collected from spontaneous interactions in naturally occurring situations You can turn on a tape recorder or videotape and before you know it you will have accumulated a library of dozens or even hundr
59. LT Language Precodes text Language precodes are used to mark the switch to a different language in multilingual interactions The text in these codes should come from the two letter ISO codes used in the Languages header Excluded Utterance bch Sometimes we want to have a way of marking utterances that are not really a part of the main interaction but are in some back channel For example during an interaction that focuses on a child the mother may make a remark to the investigator We might want to exclude remarks of this type from analysis by MLT and MLU as in this interaction CHI here one MOT no here sit the doorbell rings MOT just a moment bch MOT I ll get it bch In order to exclude the utterances marked with bch the s bch switch must be used with mlt and mlu Included Utterance trn The trn postcode can force the MLT command to treat an utterance as a turn when it would normally not be treated as a turn For example utterances containing only 0 are usually not treated as turns However if one believes that the accompanying nonverbal gesture constitutes a turn one can note this using trn as in this example CHAT Manual 77 MOT where is it CHI 0 trn Sact points at wall Later when counting utterances with mlt one can use the s trn switch to force counting of actions as turns as in this command mlt s trn s
60. M 1996 Alan Lomax Documenting folk music of the world Sing Out The Folk Song Magazine 40 30 39 Pick A 1913 Die agrammatischer Sprachst rungen Berlin Springer Verlag Preyer W 1882 Die Seele des Kindes Leipzig Grieben s Sacks H Schegloff E amp Jefferson G 1974 A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation Language 50 696 735 Sagae K Davis E Lavie E MacWhinney B amp Wintner S 2007 High accuracy annotation and parsing of CHILDES transcripts In Proceedings of the 45th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics Prague ACL Sagae K Lavie A amp MacWhinney B 2005 Automatic measurement of syntactic development in child language In Proceedings of the 43rd Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics pp 197 204 Ann Arbor ACL Sagae K MacWhinney B amp Lavie A 2004 Automatic parsing of parent child interactions Behavior Research Methods Instruments and Computers 36 113 126 Selting M amp al e 1998 Gespr chsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem GAT Linguistische Berichte 173 91 122 Slobin D 1977 Language change in childhood and in history In J Macnamara Ed Language learning and thought pp 185 214 New York Academic Press Sokolov J L amp Snow C Eds 1994 Handbook of Research in Language Development using CHILDES Hillsdale NJ Erlbaum Sperberg McQueen C M
61. N how to locate and play back media that are linked to transcripts The first field in this header specifies the name of the media file Extensions should be omitted If the media file is abe88 wav then just enter abe88 Then declare the format as sound or video It is also possible to add the terms missing or unlinked after the media type So the line has this shape Media abe88 sound missing End Like the Begin header this header uses no colon and takes no entry It is placed at the end of the file as the very last line Adding this header provides a safeguard against the danger of undetected file truncation during copying 5 3 Participant Specific Headers The third set of headers provides information specific to each participant Most of the participant specific information is in the ID tier That information can be entered by using the ID headers option in CLAN s Tiers menu The exceptions are for these tiers Birth of Birthplace of L1 of 5 4 Constant Headers Currently the constant headers follow the participant specific headers However once the participant specific headers have been merged into the ID fields the constant headers will follow the Media field These headers which are all optional describe various general facts about the file Exceptions This allows for special word forms in certain corpora Interaction Type The possible entries here include construc
62. Preyer 1882 Gvozdev 1949 Szuman 1955 Stern amp Stern 1907 Kenyeres Kenyeres 1926 1938 and Leopold 1939 1947 1949a 1949b created monumental biographies detailing the language development of their own children Darwin s biographical technique also had its effects on the study of adult aphasia Following in this tradition studies of the language of particular patients and syndromes were presented by Low 1931 Pick 1913 Wernicke 1874 and many others 2 35 Transcripts The limits of the diary technique were always quite apparent Even the most highly trained observer could not keep pace with the rapid flow of normal speech production Anyone who has attempted to follow a child about with a pen and a notebook soon realizes how much detail is missed and how the note taking process interferes with the ongoing interactions The introduction of the tape recorder in the late 1950s provided a way around these limitations and ushered in the third period of observational studies The effect of the tape recorder on the field of language acquisition was very much like its effect on ethnomusicology where researchers such as Alan Lomax Parrish 1996 were suddenly able to produce high quality field recordings using this new technology This period was characterized by projects in which groups of investigators collected large data sets of tape recordings from several subjects across a period of 2 or 3 years Much of the excitement i
63. Race uS Quen e deeds al GOT BOD TAI iusti tudine lesen eiae eot A tus cece uic msi esr 52 6 6 15 Word separation in Japafie sei dace nece eodd seule OP I QUE o Dep dud 53 6 6 16 Punctuation in French and Ildnia sd uos dete eii edd e 53 6 6 17 Abbreviations in DWICIE uui ssec ea percipe Gasltnteatinidncseeeenitrineet 54 PME rio ANCES ct sodsaniebsgasswoesdasest oE Eg oE Eosi e ressis 55 TE One Utterance or Many cord re Rp UNS pb pe deste 35 R2 Discourse REPS CLIO s epe es eR eR P te uada itd dr aas 57 7 2 paste Utterance Terminators uocat a ne a Hee REMO Codes M RRE 57 TA Satellite Markers inrsin 59 TeX OE PALAUOMS IM S 59 7 6 Tone Direction sete eost ERE YN SERENITY EUR RUIN IN HER aR LERRA RU NUR Fe SR Dex eR e UE Me A 60 TI Prosody Within MOTOS ara ecd et Ms ra eas cusa pague Fes cx Monta pe Pas noe EH ES 60 RS Local EVENS t e RH LEN URN E 61 ZET ASDHDIO Events nnen vic ce ba a a aei Aso inire ann 61 7 8 2 Complex Local BVehtsuacuau us ep aded adi d d a 62 ZAR J UMSENSQUAMSSA NES aedis aes aga Nin ed rem E E ah ee UI aoa cas 63 184 Long Events iil Sci ia testa ee aded Muti Ms eode ayaa nia E a Eaa ES aE Coe d uiae 63 7 8 5 Interposed Back C hantiel 4 et ec Detector ii UR aes 63 7 9 Special Utterance Terminators assi etr ERR HU ER HC NEIN EUREN ORA 64 TL0 Mitterance LIBKOES eee rir ee RON en De Re eee ERO YE ETHER LER see DR ER A seb RaDa 66 5 Scoped Symbols Jnpiter epaote trae ee faoc ben vusr epos ice va oet Do
64. The CHILDES Project Tools for Analyzing Talk Electronic Edition Part 1 The CHAT Transcription Format Brian MacWhinney Carnegie Mellon University August 6 2012 Citation for last printed version MacWhinney B 2000 The CHILDES Project Tools for Analyzing Talk 3 Edition Mahwah NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates CHAT Manual 2 1 Table of Contents t Fable OFC Ontemts sccsasssicewsivesucicposssicsaxatessdntasdhs cases vcsanaussvoreaauustendonetsoescessvspucsiacsoosbiusuete 2 2 Introductio saecu eir tos ceh Sowsedoonbech bovoosvonsenonsossehSe enus uvhendevsssevandcvesndedeSvusebeussdbdeets 5 2 1 Tinpressionistic Obs rvatlon iic dcc ten de use ke eene ER Ve cux Bes eoa s ruat 5 22 BabscBiosrapliles os oie D E PON BRUGES QU yes aud ae E 6 2 3 Transcripts eec erede eter OR RN ER RR A Ino eode Eon MERE UN queues un E RIR 6 DA Computers e e oto tp ap Dana tai telis io rib ud tradas 8 259 Connectivity eei eiue nt E aig ct wea daued ces gea ead ones en essi ttp ind us 8 DO SdhreecLoolSoid eto tas ttal tics tinted tach ey nae daad adinim ea rts be 9 2717 Shape CHAT 22e dst eso WP pe ope ID aia aude ase eee 9 28 B ildi s CLAN S ono Gee tare hse a eme d oe oan Sepe dni e tul e dete uide 10 2 9 Constructing the Database caosa a tie Op Dudes erbe s Deka Ret NYNSER sae FEET RARE 10 2 10 Disseminating CHILDES 5 eerte Enea enina ea Rana ene o sues ee eR ME eee RE RR 11 ZEL Fundit eenen IER 11 2 12 How to Use These Manuals
65. The goal of transcribers should be to avoid both the Scylla of overnormalization and the Charybdis of undernormalization Steering a course CHAT Manual 16 between these two dangers is no easy matter A transcription system can provide devices to aid in this process but it cannot guarantee safe passage Transcribers also often tend to assimilate the shape of sounds spoken by the learner to the shapes that are dictated by morphosyntactic patterns For example Fletcher 1985 noted that both children and adults generally produce have as uv before main verbs As a result forms like might have gone assimilate to mightuv gone Fletcher believed that younger children have not yet learned to associate the full auxiliary have with the contracted form If we write the children s forms as might have we then end up mischaracterizing the structure of their lexicon To take another example we can note that in French the various endings of the verb in the present tense are distinguished in spelling whereas they are homophonous in speech If a child says mans eat are we to transcribe it as first person singular mange as second person singular manges or as the imperative mange If the child says m se should we transcribe it as the infinitive manger the participle mang or the second person formal mangez CHAT deals with these problems in three ways First it uses IPA as a uniform way of transcribing discour
66. VslowerV creaky unsure softer louder _low pitch high pitch o smile voice J whisper f Y yawn Y singing precise constriction Upitch reset laugh in a word F1 up arrow down arrow 1 IOO AOUN C o shift shift right arrow left arrow N D G 2o0oo0o z cno oO 7 Unicode 2191 2193 21D7 2197 2192 2198 21D8 221E 2248 224B 2261 2219 2308 2309 230A 230B 2206 2207 204E 2047 00BO 25C9 2581 2594 263A 222C 03AB 222E 00A7 223E 21BB 1F29 CHAT Manual 88 33 lower quote tag or final particle t 201E 34 double dagger f vocative or summons V 2021 35 dot a Arabic dot i 0323 36 raised h h Arabic aspiration H 02BO 37 macron a stressed syllable 0304 38 glottal glottal stop q 0294 39 reverse glottal Hebrew glottal Q 0295 40 caron caron 030C The column marked F1 in the previous table gives methods for inserting the various non ASCII Unicode characters For example the smile voice or laughter stretch symbol is Y which is inserted by F1 and then the letter l After row 32 the items are inserted using F2 instead of Fl For details please consult the current list on the web Of these various symbols there are four that must be placed either at the beginning of words or inside words These include the arrows for pitch rise and fall the inverted question mark for inhalation and the symbol for quick uptake The paired symbols for int
67. a I just bought a helmet Instead this passage should be transcribed as SAR I gt bought a I just bought a helmet EXP lt that s great In the last analysis researchers who want to capture overlaps in absolutely full detail should rely on the facilities of sonic CHAT that are described for the editor rather than attempting to capture overlaps by using complex embeddings of pair delimiters Repetition Often speakers repeat words or even whole phrases Goldman Eisler 1968 MacWhinney amp Osser 1977 The symbol is used in those cases when a speaker begins to say something stops and then repeats the earlier material without change The material being retraced is enclosed in angle brackets If there are no angle brackets CLAN assumes that only the preceding word is being repeated In a retracing without correction it is necessarily the case that the material in angle brackets is the same as the material immediately following the symbol Here is an example of this BET lt I wanted I wanted to invite Margie If there are pauses and fillers between the initial material and the retracing they should be placed after the retracing symbol as in HAR it s um it s it s like a um dog When a word or group of words is repeated several times with no fillers all of the rep etitions except for the last are placed into a single retracing as in this example HAR
68. a EEE ies cR es EA rd RE 30 52 Changeable Headers uei E lady e Ven ads dca aede aumecens See eee a bU 32 6 CMDEUS dcos E A E E E AEE E EIE TAN 36 6D MeMa EAN E E P dta E AANE 37 6 2 Basle Words rti a e a itn E EAR E te ea eased 37 6 3 Special Form Markers iste We Ra ERAS EEE EA ARR ERR EG 37 6 4 Unidentifiable Material eese eene hene ener nene n nhntes stesse kein iun 41 CHAT Manual 3 6 5 Incomplete and Omitted Words ase et i elk exin Ite poe ee idis 43 6 0 Standardized Spellings 5e tdem tecto un tieni euius Rs Ped eiae qut 44 66A LENES etie a norte itat A uti acetanilide br AGE 45 6 6 2 Compounds and Linkages ise feries ni Rie o wee eir eite 45 6 6 3 lt Capitalization MR s EE A E E E E TRS E SE 46 6 6 4 Acronyms ciis usce du HN M E sled E a a uA Dua 46 6 6 5 Numbers and Titles coss ete Dto ecd da sae tt amabeia tensed acd Leto t bone brat rest 46 6 6 6 Kinship FOrMS aia Seales e enun vito Veget ulace seda dac ai tle mae ear 47 0 0 7 Shortens Seca cuiid ss Mise letntaen ats OLS ee dees eae elles ed Makaha 47 6 6 5 Assimilation Seeders dee id ssid ud ite Ala daar altace deu sueco 48 6 69 EXCIOMANONS os uit dieit et oak GENI Guise ene eon 49 06 0 107 CON ISEUVICOLOENS one aad eee thc de aoe ea 50 6 611 Spelling Varis nhn ct coh iv nro led c leased es eive aaas 50 6 0 42 Collogiial FOM S i soyir Vom eMe pest uzlas GU deb i gp Msc pague QUA exe plas n 51 6 6 13 Dialectal Variations usen oe cu a eb as ERR eb
69. a letter sequence MOT could you please spell your name MAR it s m l a801 r l kel The dictionary says that abc is a standard word so that is accepted without the l marking In Japanese many letters refer to whole syllables or kana such as ro or ka To represent this as well as strings of letters in English use the k symbol as in ka k or jkImn g k Using this form the above example cover better be coded as MOT could you please spell your name MAR it s mark k 6 6 2 Compounds and Linkages Languages use a variety of methods for combining words into larger lexical items One method involves inflectional processes such as cliticization and affixation that will be discussed later Here we consider compounds and linkages Earlier it was necessary to write compounds in the form of bird house and baby sitter but now the plus is no longer necessary You can just write birdhouse and babysitter and the correct form will be inserted into the Vomor line by the MOR program The other level of concatenation involves the use of an underscore to indicate the fact that a phrasal combination is not really a compound but what we call a linkage Common examples here include titles of books such as Green Eggs and Ham appelations such as Little Bo Beep or Santa Claus lines from songs such as The Farmer in the Dell and places such as Hong Kong University For these forms the underscore is used to emphasize the fact that
70. a wide variety of relations including paralinguistics explanations and retracings 6 1 Audio and Video Time Marks In order to link segments of the transcript to stretches of digitized audio and video CHAT uses the following notation Time Alignment 0 1073 This marker provides the begin and end time in milliseconds for a segment in digitized video file or audio file If you use the escape A command in the editor all of this information is hidden and you see a single bullet Each set of time alignment information has an implicit scope that includes all of the material to the left up to the next set of bullets These time marks allow for single utterance playback or continuous playback If you insert a dash before the time this indicates that continuous playback should not actually wait through long periods of silence between the bullets By default these bullets should occur at the end of speaker lines after the final terminator and after any postcodes However if the option multiple is selected in the Options field then bullets may also occur within utterances Pic Bullet Yopic cat jpg This marker is used to insert a bullet that can be clicked to display a picture This field is also used in the gesture coding system discussed in the CLAN manual The format of these files is not fixed by CHAT but many of the same conventions are used One additional code used there is the T header which marks the place of the insertio
71. ake use of these new tools the current shape of the CHILDES system reflects many of these new realities In the pages that follow you will learn about how we are using this new technology to provide rapid access to the database and to permit the linkage of transcripts to digitized audio and video records even over the Internet For further ideas regarding this type of work you may wish to connect to http talkbank org where there are various extensions of the CHILDES project 2 6 Three Tools The reasons for developing a computerized exchange system for language data are immediately obvious to anyone who has produced or analyzed transcripts With such a system we can 1 automate the process of data analysis 2 obtain better data in a consistent fully documented transcription system and 3 provide more data for more children from more ages speaking more languages The CHILDES system has addressed each of these goals by developing three separate but integrated tools The first tool is the CHAT transcription and coding format The sec ond tool is the clan analysis program and the third tool is the database These three tools are like the legs of a three legged stool The transcripts in the database have all been put into the CHAT transcription system The program is designed to make full use of the CHAT format to facilitate a wide variety of searches and analyses Many research groups are now using the CHILDES programs to enter new data
72. al items in a single utterance CHI milk milk milk milk 2 Transcription of the words as items in a single utterance separated by commas CHI milk milk milk milk 3 Transcription as four repetitions of a single word CHI milk x 4 4 Treatment of the words as a series of attempts to repeat the single word CHI milk milk milk milk 5 Treatment of the words as separate utterances CHI milk CHI milk CHI milk CHI milk These five forms of transcription will lead to markedly different analytic outcomes Consider the ways in which the five forms will lead to different results in the mlu com mand The first three forms will all be counted as having one utterance with four mor phemes for an MLU of 4 0 The fourth form will be counted as having one utterance with one morpheme for an MLU of 1 0 The fifth form will be counted as having four utterances each with one morpheme for an MLU of 1 0 Admittedly not all analyses depend crucially on the computation of MLU but prob lems with deciding how to compute MLU point to deeper issues in transcription and anal ysis In order to compute MLU one has to decide what is a word and what is an utterance and these are two of the biggest decisions that one has to make when transcribing and analyzing child language In this sense the computation of MLU serves as a methodological trip wire for the consideration of these two deeper issues Other analyses including
73. amations CS Counter suggestion an indirect refusal DR Dare or challenge hearer to perform an action GI Give in accept other s insistence or refusal GR Give reason justify a request for an action refusal or prohibition CHAT Manual RD RP RQ SS WD 97 Refuse to carry out an act requested or proposed by other Request propose or suggest an action for hearer or for hearer and speaker Yes no question or suggestion about hearer s wishes and intentions Signal to start performing an act such as running or rolling a ball Warn of danger Speech Elicitations CX EA EI EC EX RT SC Commitments FP PA PD PF SI TD Declarations DC DP ND YD Markings CM EM EN ES MK TO XA Statements AP CN DW ST Complete text if so demanded Elicit onomatopoeic or animal sounds Elicit imitation of word or sentence by modelling or by explicit command Elicit completion of word or sentence Elicit completion of rote learned text Repeat or imitate other s utterance Complete statement or other utterance in compliance with request Ask for permission to carry out act Permit hearer to perform act Promise Prohibit forbid protest hearer s performance of an act State intent to carry out act by speaker Threaten to do Create a new state of affairs by declaration Declare make believe reality Disagree with a declaration Agree to a declaration Commiserate express sympa
74. ample cha CHAT Manual 78 9 Dependent Tiers In the previous chapters we have examined how CHAT can be used to create file headers and to code the actual words of the interaction on the main line The third major component of a CHAT transcript is the ancillary information given on the dependent tiers Dependent tiers are lines typed below the main line that contain codes comments events and descriptions of interest to the researcher It is important to have this material on separate lines because the extensive use of complex codes in the main line would make it unreadable There are many codes that refer to the utterance as a whole Using a separate line to mark these avoids having to indicate their scope or cluttering up the end of an utterance with codes It is important to emphasize that no one expects any researcher to code all tiers for all files CHAT is designed to provide options for coding not requirements for coding These options constitute a common set of coding conventions that will allow the investigator to represent those aspects of the data that are most important It is often possible to transcribe the main line without making much use at all of dependent tiers However for some projects dependent tiers are crucial All dependent tiers should begin with the percent symbol 96 and should be in lower case letters As in the main line dependent tiers consist of a tier code and a tier line The dependent tier code is the per
75. and Ital ian In French when a word begins with a vowel this leads in some cases to the disappearance of the final vowel of the preceding word as in I ami and not le ami In standard spelling the vowel e is elided and the two words are linked together by an apostrophe without a space When transcribing these forms into CHAT it is important to add a space after the apostrophe in order to allow for direct searching for the elided pronouns and articles and in order to make more accurate morpheme counts and analyses In particular the following strings must be followed by a space c d j l m n qu s t and y Similar rules apply to parallel forms in Italian and Dutch For similar reasons the dashes that are used in words such as est ce or qu est ce should be replaced with spaces Thus these forms should be transcribed as est ce and qu est ce In other cases such as abat jour the French hyphen indicates a true com pound and should be replaced by the plus symbol as in abat jour However you should use the tilde for cliticization as in a bas or donnez moi Spanish does not use punctuation to mark cliticization so you can just use standard orthography for forms such as damelo CHAT Manual 54 6 6 17 Abbreviations in Dutch Dutch makes extensive use of abbreviations in which vowels are often omitted leaving single consonants which are merged with nearby words For consistency of morphological
76. ape or preferably a videotape Coding on the other hand is the process of recognizing analyzing and taking note of phenomena in transcribed speech Coding can often be done by referring only to a written transcript For example the coding of parts of speech can be done directly from a transcript without listening to the audiotape For other types of coding such as speech act coding it is imperative that coding be done while watching the original videotape The CHAT system includes conventions for both transcription and coding When first learning the system it is best to focus on learning how to transcribe The CHAT system offers the transcriber a large array of coding options Although few transcribers will need to use all of the options everyone needs to understand how basic transcription is done on the main line Additional coding is done principally on the secondary or dependent tiers As transcribers work more with their data they will include further options from the secondary or dependent tiers However the beginning user should focus first on CHAT Manual 18 learning to correctly use the conventions for the main line The manual includes several sample transcripts to help the beginner in learning the transcription system 3 5 Three Goals Like other forms of communication transcription systems are subjected to a variety of communicative pressures The view of language structure developed by Slobin 1977 sees stru
77. as been lost at the beginning of the file This is a bare header that takes no entry and uses no colon Languages This is the second visible header it tells the programs which language is being used in the dialogues Here is an example of this line for a bilingual transcript using Swedish and Portuguese Languages sv pt The language codes come from the international ISO 639 3 standard For the languages currently in the database these three letter codes and extended codes are used Table 1 ISO Language Codes Language Code Language Code Language Code Afrikaans afr German deu Polish pol Arabic ara Greek ell Basque eus Hebrew heb Portuguese por Cantonese zho yue Hungarian hun Punjabi pan Catalan cat Icelandic isl Romanian ron Chinese zho Indonesian ind Russian rus Irish gle Spanish spa CHAT Manual 26 Croatian hrv Italian ita Swahili swa Czech ces Japanese jpn Swedish swe Danish dan Javanese jav Tagalog tag Dutch nld Kannada kan Taiwanese zho min English eng Kikuyu kik Tamil tam Estonian est Korean kor Thai tha Farsi fas Lithuanian lit Turkish tur Finnish sun Norwegian nor Vietnamese vie French fra Welsh cym Galician glg Yiddish yid We continually update this list and CLAN relies on a file in the lib fixes directory called ISO 639 cut that lists the current languages In multilingual corpora several codes can be
78. ases it may be possible to identify a default language and to mark a few words as intrusions into the default language In other cases mixing and switching are more intense CHAT provides several ways of dealing with code switching The selection of some or all of these methods of notation depends primarily on the user s needs for retrieval of codes during analysis 1 The languages spoken by the various participants can be noted with the Lan guage of XXX header tier 2 Individual words may be identified with the s terminator to indicate their second language status The exact identity of the second language can be coded as needed For example words in French could be noted as f and words in German as g In the limiting case it would be possible to mark every single word in a French German bilingual transcript as either f or g Of course doing this would be tedious but it would provide a complete key for eventual retrieval and study 3 It is possible to use the six letter code for the main tier as an easy way of indi cating the matrix language being used for each utterance For example CHIGG could indicate the child speaking German to a German speaker and CHIGF could indicate the child speaking German to a French speaker Retrieval during analysis would then rely on the use of the t switch as in t CHIG t CHUGG and t CHI 4 The system of gem markers can also be used to indicate the beginnings and ends of segments of dis
79. at follows the first bracket tells CLAN that the material in brackets should replace the preceding word The replacing string can include any number of words but the thing being replaced can only be a single word not a series of words There must be a space following the colon in order to keep this symbol separate from other symbols that use letters after the colon This example also illustrates two other ways in which CHAT and clan deal with nonstandard forms The lexical item ya is treated as a lexical item distinct from you However the semantic equivalence between ya and you is maintained by the formalization of a list of dialectal spelling variations The string doin g is treated by CLAN as if it were doing This is done by simply having the programs ignore the parentheses unless they are given instructions to pay attention to them as discussed in in the CLAN manual From the viewpoint of CLAN a form like doin g is just another incomplete form such as broth er In order for replacement to function properly nothing should be placed between the replacing string and the string to be replaced For example one should use the form goed went rather than goed went CHAT Manual 71 Replacement of Real Word text When the error involves the incorrect use of a real word the double colon form of the replacement string is used as in piece peach For furth
80. ate utterances CHI red CHI yellow CHI blue CHI white As the child gets older the solidification of intonational patterns and syntactic struc tures will give the transcriber more reason to group words together into utterances and to code retracings and repetitions as parts of larger utterances CHAT Manual 57 A somewhat separate but related issue is the treatment of interactional markers and other communicators such as yes sure well and now In general it seems best to group these markers together with the utterances to which they are most closely bound intonationally However it only makes sense to do this if the utterances are contiguous in discourse Here are some examples CHI no Mommy no go CHI no Mommy go CHI no Mommy go However in other cases it makes sense to transcribe no by itself y CHI no MOT why not CHI Mommy go 7 2 Discourse Repetition In the previous section we discussed problems involved in deciding whether a group of words should be viewed as one utterance or as several This issue moves into the back ground when the word repetitions are broken up by the conversational interactions or by the child s own actions Consider this example MOT what do you drink for breakfast CHI milk MOT and what do you drink for lunch CHI milk MOT how about for dinner CHI milk MOT and what is your favorite thing to drink
81. ators have continued to hit upon new ways of inferring grammatical and semantic knowledge or competence from free conversation But for myself I must in candor add that there was also a factor of research style I have little patience with prolonged tooling up for research I always want to get started A better scientist would probably have done more planning and used the computer CHAT Manual 8 He can do so today in any case with considerable confidence that he knows what to code With the experience of three more decades of computerized analysis behind us we now know that the idea of reducing child language data to a set of codes and then throwing away the original data is simply wrong Instead our goal must be to computerize the data in a way that allows us to continually enhance it with new codes and annotations It is fortunate that Brown preserved his transcript data in a form that allowed us to continue to work on it It is unfortunate however that the original audiotapes were not kept 2 4 Computers Just as these data analysis problems were coming to light a major technological opportunity was emerging in the shape of the powerful affordable microcomputer Microcomputer word processing systems and database programs allowed researchers to enter transcript data into computer files that could then be easily duplicated edited and analyzed by standard data processing techniques In 1981 when the Child Language Data Exchange
82. ave been transcribed but the transcription has not yet been double checked 5 This file has not yet passed successfully through CHECK 5 5 Changeable Headers Changeable headers can occur either at the beginning of the file along with the constant headers or else in the body of the file Changeable headers contain information that can change within the file For example if the file contains material that was recorded on only one day the Date header would occur only once at the beginning of the file However if the file contains some material from a later day the Date header would be used again later in the file to indicate the next date These changeable headers appear then at the point within the file where the information changes The list that follows is alphabetical Activities This header describes the activities involved in the situation The entry is a list of component activities in the situation Suppose the Situation header reads Getting ready to go out The Activities header would then list what was involved in this such as putting on coats gathering school books and saying good bye Bck CHAT Manual 33 Diary material that was not originally transcribed in the CHAT format often has explanatory or background material placed before a child s utterance When converting this material to the CHAT format it is sometimes impossible to decide whether this background material occurs before during or after the
83. cent symbol followed by a three letter code ID and a colon The dependent tier line is the text entered after the colon that describes fully the elements of interest in the main tier Except for the Yomor and gra tiers these lines do not require ending punctuation Here is an example of a main line with two dependent tiers MOT well go get it spa IMP SREF SINS mor ADV well V go amp PRES V get amp PRES PRO it The first dependent tier indicates certain speech act codes and the second indicates a morphemic analysis with certain part of speech coding Coding systems have been devel oped for some dependent tiers Often these codes begin with the symbol If there are more than one code they can be put in strings with only spaces separating them as in spa SIMP SREF SINS Multiple dependent tiers may be added in reference to a single main line giving you as much richness in descriptive capability as is needed 9 1 Standard Dependent Tiers When possible dependent tiers should be selected from the standard list of 3 letter tiers given here However if this list is inadequate users can create extension tiers using three letters preceded by x as in xtob for a tier that marks ToBI prosodic features Here we list all of the dependent tier types that are used for child language data It is CHAT Manual 79 unlikely that a given corpus would ever be transcribed in all of these ways The listing that follows is alphabetical
84. ces of the family is particularly important in attempting to understand sociolinguistic issues regarding language change regionalism and dialect Without detailed information about specific dialect features it is difficult to know whether these particular markers are being used throughout the language or just in certain regions 8 Situational descriptions The readme file should include descriptions of the contexts of the recordings such as the layout of the child s home and bedroom or the nature of the activities being recorded Additional specific situational in formation should be included in the Situation and Comment fields in each file The various readme files for the corpora that are now in the CHILDES database were all contributed in this form To maintain consistency and promote an overview of the database these files were then edited and reformatted and combined into the database files that can now be downloaded from the server 4 6 Checking Syntactic Accuracy Each CLAN command runs a very superficial check to see if a file conforms to min CHAT This check looks only to see that each line begins with either 96 a tab or a space This is the minimum that the CLAN commands must have to function However the correct functioning of many of the functions of CLAN depends on adherence to further standards for minCHAT In order to make sure that a file matches these minimum requirements for correct analysis through CLAN researcher
85. course in particular languages 5 A large database may consist of files in certain well specified interaction types For example conversations with the mother may be in German and those with the father in French If this is the case the careful selection of file names such as ger01 cha and fre01 cha can be used to facilitate analysis CHAT Manual 92 These techniques are all designed to facilitate the retrieval of material in one language separately from the other The choice of one method over another will depend on the nature of the material being transcribed and the eventual goals of the analysis Problems similar to those involved in code switching occur in studies of narratives where a speaker may assume a variety of roles or voices For example a child may be speaking either as the dragon in a story or as the narrator of the story or as herself These different roles are most easily coded by marking the six character main line code with forms such as CHIDRG CHINAR and CHISEL for child as dragon child as narrator and child as self However the other forms discussed above for noting code switching can also be used for these purposes 12 2 Elicited Narratives and Picture Descriptions Often researchers use a set of structured materials to elicit narratives and descriptions These may be a series of pictures in a story book a set of photos a film or a series of ac tions involving objects The transcripts that are collected durin
86. cture as emerging from the pressure of three conflicting charges or goals On the one hand language is designed to be clear On the other hand it is designed to be processible by the listener and quick and easy for the speaker Unfortunately ease of production often comes in conflict with clarity of marking The competition between these three motives leads to a variety of imperfect solutions that satisfy each goal only partially Such imperfect and unstable solutions characterize the grammar and phonology of human language Bates amp MacWhinney 1982 Only rarely does a solution succeed in fully achieving all three goals Slobin s view of the pressures shaping human language can be extended to analyze the pressures shaping a transcription system In many regards a transcription system is much like any human language It needs to be clear in its markings of categories and still preserve readability and ease of transcription However unlike a human language a transcription system needs to address two different audiences One audience is the human audience of transcribers analysts and readers The other audience is the digital computer and its programs In order to successfully deal with these two audiences a system for computerized transcription needs to achieve the following goals 1 Clarity Every symbol used in the coding system should have some clear and definable real world referent The relation between the referent and the symbol shoul
87. d PHONFREQ commands Darius Clynes ported CLAN to the Macintosh Jeffrey Sokolov wrote the CHIP pro gram Mitzi Morris designed the MOR analyzer using specifications provided by Roland Hauser of Erlangen University Norio Naka and Susanne Miyata developed a MOR rule system for Japanese and Monica Sanz Torrent helped develop the MOR system for Spanish Julia Evans provided recommendations for the design of the audio and visual capabilities of the editor Johannes Wagner Mike Forrester and Chris Ramsden helped show us how we could modify clan to permit transcription in the Conversation Analysis framework Steven Gillis provided suggestions for aspects of MODREP Christophe Parisse built the POST and POSTTRAIN programs Parisse amp Le Normand 2000 Brian Richards contributed the VOCD program Malvern Richards Chipere amp Puran 2004 Julia Evans helped specify TIMEDUR and worked on the details of DSS Catherine Snow designed CHAINS KEYMAP and STATFREQ Nan Bernstein Ratner specified aspects of PHONFREQ and plans for additional programs for phonological analysis 2 9 Constructing the Database The primary reason for the success of the CHILDES database has been the generosity of over 100 researchers who have contributed their corpora Each of these corpora represents hundreds often thousands of hours spent in careful collection transcription and checking of data All researchers in child language should be proud of the way researchers ha
88. d be consistent and reliable Symbols that mark particular words should al ways be spelled in a consistent manner Symbols that mark particular conversa tional patterns should refer to actual patterns consistently observable in the data In practice codes will always have to steer between the Scylla of overregular ization and the Charybdis of underregularization discussed earlier Distinctions must avoid being either too fine or too coarse Another way of looking at clarity is through the notion of systematicity Systematicity is a simple extension of clarity across transcripts or corpora Codes words and symbols must be used in a consistent manner across transcripts Ideally each code should always have a unique meaning independent of the presence of other codes or the particular tran script in which it is located If interactions are necessary as in hierarchical coding systems these interactions need to be systematically described 2 Readability Just as human language needs to be easy to process so transcripts need to be easy to read This goal often runs directly counter to the first goal In the CHILDES system we have attempted to provide a variety of CHAT options that will allow a user to maximize the readability of a transcript We have also provided clan tools that will allow a reader to suppress the less readable aspects in transcript when the goal of readability is more important than the goal of clarity of marking 3 Ease of data
89. d header line 99 66 Situation Tim and Bill are playing with toys in the hallway There should be enough situational information given to allow the user to reconstruct the situation as much as possible Who is present What is the layout of the room or other space What is the social role of those present Who is usually the caregiver What activity is in progress Is the activity routinized and if so what is the nature of the routine Is the routine occurring in its standard time place and personnel configuration What objects are present that affect or assist the interaction It will also be important to include relevant ethnographic information that would make the interaction interpretable to the user of the database For example if the text is parent child interaction before an observer what is the culture s evaluation of behaviors such as silence talking a lot displaying formulaic skills defending against challenges and so forth CHAT Manual 36 6 Words Words are the basic building blocks for all sentential and discourse structures By studying the development of word use we can learn an enormous amount about the growth of syntax discourse morphology and conceptual structure However in order to realize the full potential of computational analysis of word usage we need to follow certain basic rules In particular we need to make sure that we spell words in a consistent manner If we sometimes use the form doughnut and s
90. d is stressed The angle brackets can also mark the stressing of a string of words as in this example MOT Billy would you please take your shoes off Contrastive Stressing iM This symbol can be used without accompanying angle brackets to indicate that the preceding word is contrastively stressed If a whole string of words is contrastively stressed they should be enclosed in angle brackets 8 3 Explanations and Alternatives Explanation text CHAT Manual 70 This symbol is used for brief explanations on the text tier This symbol is helpful for specifying the deictic identity of objects and people MOT don t look in there closet Explanations can be more elaborate as in this example ROS you don t scare me anymore the command don t scare me anymore An alternative form for transcribing this 1s ROS you don t scare me any more Sexp means to issue the imperative Don t scare me anymore Replacement text Earlier we discussed the use of a variety of nonstandard forms such as gonna and hafta In order for MOR to morphemicize such words the transcriber can use a replacement symbol that allows clan to substitute a morphemicized form for the form ac tually produced Here is an example BEA when ya gonna going to stop doin g that CHA whyncha why don t you just be quiet In this example gonna is followed by its standard form in brackets The colon th
91. d to hear because of interference from room noise recorder malfunction vocal qualities and so forth Nonetheless transcribers may think that through the noise they can recognize what is being said There is some residual uncer tainty about this best guess This symbol marks this in relation to the single preceding word or the previous group of words enclosed in angle brackets CHAT Manual 72 SAR I want a frog In this example the word that is unclear is frog In general when there is a symbol in square brackets that takes scoping and there are no preceding angle brackets then the single preceding word is the scope When more than one word is unclear you can surround the unclear portion in angle brackets as in the following example SAR going away with my mommy 8 4 Retracing Overlap and Clauses Overlap Follows gt During the course of a conversation speakers often talk at the same time Transcribing these interactions can be trying This and the following two symbols are designed to help sort out this difficult transcription task The overlap follows symbol indicates that the text enclosed in angle brackets is being said at the same time as the following speaker s bracketed speech They are talking at the same time This code must be used in combination with the overlap precedes symbol as in this example MOT no Sarah you have to lt stop doing that gt gt SAR lt
92. dard American English In this regard they differ from the various nonstandard forms indicated by the special form markers b Qc f 1 n o Wp and s Because there 1s no clear limit to the number of possible babbling forms onomatopoeic forms or neologistic forms there is no way to provide a list of such forms In contrast the words CHAT Manual 45 given in this section are fairly well known to most speakers of the language and many can be found in unabridged dictionaries The list given here is only a beginning over time we intend to continue to add new forms Some of the forms use parentheses to indicate optional material For example the ex clamation yeek can also be said as eek When a speaker uses the full form the transcriber types in yeek and when the speaker uses the reduced form the transcriber types y eek When clan analyzes the transcripts the parentheses can be ignored and both yeek and eek will be retrieved as instances of the same word Parentheses can also be used to indicate missing fragments of suffixes The majority of the words listed can be found in the form given in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Those forms that cannot be found in Webster s Third are indicated with an asterisk The asterisk should not be used in actual transcription 6 6 1 Letters To transcribe letters use the 1 symbol after the letter For example the letter b would be b I Here is an example of the spelling of
93. de as in this example he she s r ret she said it was fine Phonological errors To be considered a phonological error the error must meet these criteria For one syllable words consisting of an onset initial phoneme or phonemes plus vowel nucleus plus coda final phoneme or phonemes the error must match on 2 out of 3 of those elements e g onset plus vowel nucleus OR vowel nucleus plus coda OR onset plus coda The part of the syllable that is in error may be a substitution addition or omission For one syllable words with no onset e g eat or no coda e g pay the absence of the onset or coda in the error would also count as a match For multi syllabic words the error must have complete syllable matches on all but one syllable and the syllable with the error must meet the one syllable word match criteria stated above Note Errors that do not meet these criteria e g only 1 of 3 elements match will be coded as s ur if they are real words and n k if they are non words so if you prefer to use less strict criteria for phonological errors you should check these categories as well p w the error is a real word note the use of the double colon heat eat gun done breeding bleeding boater butter say see cable table we three bag bad p n the error is a non word transcribe using IPA and attach Qu to the error p3 sit u person kelm u telling
94. dependent tier or header line Period A period marks the end of an unmarked declarative utterance Here are some exam ples of unmarked utterances SAR I got cold SAR pickle SAR no For correct functioning of clan periods should be eliminated from abbreviations Thus Mrs should be written as Mrs and E T should become E 7 Only proper nouns and the word I and its contractions are capitalized Words that begin sentences are not capitalized Question Mark The question mark indicates the end of a question A question is an utterance that uses a wh question word subject verb inversion or a tag question ending Here is an example of a question FAT is that a carrot The question mark can also be used after a declarative sentence when it is spoken with the rising intonation of a question Exclamation Point An exclamation point marks the end of an imperative or emphatic utterance Here is an example of an exclamation MOT sit down If this utterance were to be conveyed with final rising contour it would instead be MOT sit down CHAT Manual 59 7 4 Satellite Markers There are two marks in CHAT for satellite material occurring at the beginning and ends of utterances that is somehow separate from the utterance A special double comma Unicode symbol can be used to mark tag questions This mark should be surrounded with spaces It is entered using the F2 t combination MOT you re coming
95. discourse basis of sentence production Chafe 1980 Jefferson 1984 has demonstrated a close link between tone units and ideational units Retracings pauses stress and all forms of intonational contours are crucial markers of aspects of the utterance planning process Moreover these features also convey important sociolinguistic information Within special markings or conventions there is no way to directly indicate these important aspects of interactions 3 2 3 Working With Video Whatever form a transcript may take it will never contain a fully accurate record of what went on in an interaction A transcript of an interaction can never fully replace an CHAT Manual 17 audiotape because an audio recording of the interaction will always be more accurate in terms of preserving the actual details of what transpired By the same token an audio recording can never preserve as much detail as a video recording with a high quality audio track Audio recordings record none of the nonverbal interactions that often form the backbone of a conversational interaction Hence they systematically exclude a source of information that is crucial for a full interpretation of the interaction Although there are biases involved even in a video recording it is still the most accurate record of an interaction that we have available For those who are trying to use transcription to capture the full detailed character of an interaction it is imperative that transcr
96. e role of gaze pointing intonation and mutual understanding as fundamental cues to language learning Modern research in word learning P Bloom 2000 has supported every point of Augustine s analysis as well as his emphasis on the role of children s intentions In this sense Augustine s somewhat fanciful recollection of his own language acquisition remained the high water mark for child language studies through the Middle Ages and even the Enlightenment Unfortunately the method on which these insights were grounded depends on our ability to actually recall the events of early childhood a gift granted to very few of us 2 2 Baby Biographies Charles Darwin provided much of the inspiration for the development of the second major technique for the study of language acquisition Using note cards and field books to track the distribution of hundreds of species and subspecies in places like the Galapagos and Indonesia Darwin was able to collect an impressive body of naturalistic data in support of his views on natural selection and evolution In his study of gestural development in his son Darwin 1877 showed how these same tools for naturalistic observation could be adopted to the study of human development By taking detailed daily notes Darwin showed how researchers could build diaries that could then be converted into biographies documenting virtually any aspect of human development Following Darwin s lead scholars such as Ament 1899
97. e utterance of the main speaker These interposed remarks represent a back channel contribution that is relevant to the main channel The term back channel is also used by some to refer to what Goffman would call a side channel that is not directed to the content of the speaker who has the floor Those remarks are marked by the postcode bch instead Interposed Word amp MOT yeah CHAT Manual 64 7 9 Special Utterance Terminators In addition to the three basic utterance terminators CHAT provides a series of more complex utterance terminators to mark various special functions These special terminators all begin with the symbol and end with one of the three basic utterance terminators Trailing Off Foes The trailing off or incompletion marker is the terminator for an incomplete but not interrupted utterance Trailing off occurs when speakers shift attention away from what they are saying sometimes even forgetting what they were going to say Usually the trailing off is followed by a pause in the conversation After this lull the speaker may continue with another utterance or a new speaker may produce the next utterance Here is an example of an uncompleted utterance SAR smells good enough for SAR what is that If the speaker does not really get a chance to trail off before being interrupted by another speaker then use the interruption marker rather than the incompletion symbol Do not use the incompleti
98. ead Some codes of this type include amp head yes amp head no amp head shake amp hands no amp hands hello amp eyes open amp mouth open and amp mouth close This form of coding is compact and can be easily searched Moreover it is easy to locate at a point within an ongoing utterance without breaking up the readability of the utterance Whenever possible try to use this form of coding as a substitute for writing longer comments on the comment line or inserting complex local events on the main line 7 8 2 Complex Local Events In addition to the restricted set of simple events discussed above it is possible to use an open form to simply insert any sort of description of an event on the main line Complex Local Event text Like the simple local events these complex local events are assumed to occur exactly at the position marked in the text and not to extend over some other events If the material is intended as a comment over a longer scope of events use the form of the scoped comments given in the next section This form of coding can also be used at the very beginning of utterances to replace the earlier precodes that marked things like the specific addressee events just before the utterance or the background to the utterance CHAT Manual 63 7 8 3 Pauses The third type of local event is the unfilled pause which takes up a specified duration of time at the point marked by the code Pauses that are mark
99. ed only by silence are coded on the main line with the symbol Longer pauses between words can be represented as and a very long pause as This example illustrates these forms SAR I don t know SAR what do you think If you want to be exact you can code the exact length of the pauses in seconds as in these examples SAR I don t 0 15 know SAR 13 4 what do you 2 think 7 8 4 Long Events It is possible to mark the beginning and ending of some extralinguistic event with the long feature convention For this marking there is a beginning code at the beginning of the event and a termination code for the ending Long Event amp l intervening text amp Y Here the asterisk marks some description of the long event For example a speaker could begin pounding on the table at the point marked by amp il pounding table and then continue until the end marked by amp l pounding table Long Nonverbal Event amp n intervening text amp n Here the asterisk marks some description of a long nonverbal event For example a speaker could begin waving their hands at the point marked by amp l waving hands and then continue until the end marked by amp l waving hands 7 8 5 Interposed Back Channel It is sometimes convenient to mark the interposition of a short comment word such as yeah or mhm within a longer discourse from the speaker who has the floor without breaking up th
100. eds of hours of naturalistic interactions But simply collecting data is only the beginning of a much larger task because the process of transcribing and analyzing naturalistic samples is extremely time consuming and often unreliable In this first volume we will present a set of computational tools designed to increase the reliability of transcriptions automate the process of data analysis and facilitate the sharing of transcript data These new computational tools have brought about revolutionary changes in the way that research is conducted in the child language field In addition they have equally revolutionary potential for the study of second language learning adult conversational interactions sociological content analyses and language recovery in aphasia Although the tools are of wide applicability this volume concentrates on their use in the child language field in the hope that researchers from other areas can make the necessary analogies to their own topics Before turning to a detailed examination of the current system it may be helpful to take a brief historical tour over some of the major highlights of earlier approaches to the collection of data on language acquisition These earlier approaches can be grouped into five major historical periods 2 1 Impressionistic Observation The first attempt to understand the process of language development appears in a re markable passage from The Confessions of St Augustine 1952 In t
101. en lan guage as if it were written language The decision to write out stretches of vocal material using the forms of written language can trigger a variety of theoretical commitments As Ochs 1979 showed so clearly these decisions will inevitably turn transcription into a theoretical enterprise The most difficult bias to overcome is the tendency to map every form spoken by a learner be it a child an aphasic or a second language learner onto a set of standard lexical items in the adult language Transcribers tend to assimilate nonstandard learner strings to standard forms of the adult language For example when a child says put on my jamas the transcriber may instead enter put on my pajamas reasoning unconsciously that jamas is simply a childish form of pajamas This type of regularization of the child form to the adult lexical norm can lead to misunderstanding of the shape of the child s lexicon For example it could be the case that the child uses jamas and pajamas to refer to two very different things Clark 1987 MacWhinney 1989 There are two types of errors possible here One involves mapping a learner s spoken form onto an adult form when in fact there was no real correspondence This is the prob lem of overnormalization The second type of error involves failing to map a learner s spoken form onto an adult form when in fact there is a correspondence This is the problem of undernormalization
102. entry As distinctions proliferate within a transcription system data entry becomes increasingly difficult and error prone There are two ways of CHAT Manual 19 dealing with this problem One method attempts to simplify the coding scheme and its categories The problem with this approach is that it sacrifices clarity The second method attempts to help the transcriber by providing computational aids The CLAN programs follow this path They provide systems for the automatic checking of transcription accuracy methods for the automatic analysis of mor phology and syntax and tools for the semiautomatic entry of codes However the basic process of transcription has not been automated and remains the major task during data entry CHAT Manual 20 4 CHAT Outline CHAT provides both basic and advanced formats for transcription and coding The basic level of CHAT is called minCHAT New users should start by learning minCHAT This system looks much like other intuitive transcription systems that are in general use in the fields of child language and discourse analysis However eventually users will find that there is something they want to be able to code that goes beyond minCHAT At that point they should move on to learning midCHAT 4 1 minCHAT the Form of Files There are several minimum standards for the form of a minCHAT file These standards must be followed for the CLAN commands to run successfully on CHAT files 1 Every line must end
103. eologism n k neologism known target n uk neologism unknown target n k s neologism known target stereotypy n uk s neologism unknown target stereotypy d dysfluency d sw dysfluency within word as in insuhside for inside m a morphological agreement error m a agreement error as in have for has m a 0es missing 3 person singular s suffix agreement error m a es superfluous 3 person singular agreement error as in we goes m a 0s missing plural on noun as in two sister m a s superfluous plural on noun as in one dogs Agreement errors should only be marked on the verb or the head noun not on both agreeing items For the coding of morphological errors these abbreviations can be used CHAT Manual 100 ing progressive S plural es 3 person singular ed past en perfective S possessive m other morphological errors m c case error m 0s missing plural s suffix including child for children m 0 s missing possessive s suffix m 0ing missing progressive ing suffix m 0ed missing past ed suffix including come from came m ed overregularized ed as in seed for saw m s overregularized s as in childs for children m s superfluous plural as in feets for feet gowns for gown or children for child m ed superfluous past as in ranned for ran walked for walk or came for come m ing superfluous progressive as coming for come m es superfluous 3 person singular s suffix m s
104. er int This tier codes intonations using standard language descriptions Model Tier mod This tier is used in conjunction with the pho tier to code the phonological form of the adult target or model for each of the learner s phonological forms Morphological Tier Yomor This tier codes morphemic segments by type and part of speech Here is an example of the mor tier MAR I wanted a toy mor PRO I amp 1S V want PAST DET a amp INDEF N toy Paralinguistics Tier Yopar This tier codes paralinguistic behaviors such as coughing and crying Phonology Tier Yopho This dependent tier is used to describe phonological phenomena When the researcher is attempting to describe phonological errors the err line should be used instead The pho line is to be used when the entire utterance is being coded in IPA Here is an exam ple of the pho tier in use SAR I got a bootboo pho ai get bubu Transcription on the pho line should be done using the IPA symbols in Unicode To do this easily you need to use a keyboard entry system Information on such systems is available from http childes psy cmu edu Words on the main tier should align in a one to one fashion with forms on the phonological tier This alignment takes all forms produced into account and does not exclude retraces or non word forms On the pho line it is sometimes important to describe several words as forming a single phonological group in order to describe l
105. er details on this usage please see the chapter on Error Coding Alternative Transcription text Sometimes it is difficult to choose between two possible transcriptions for a word or group of words In that case an alternative transcription can be indicated in this way CHI we want one or two one too Dependent Tier on Main Line Voxxx text There are six dependent tiers that can be placed directly on the main line They are Voact Yadd Vogpx int Ysit and spe This placement of dependent tier information is useful when you wish to refer to a particular set of words rather than the utterance as a whole as in this example RES would all of you who have not had seconds gpx looks at Timmy come up to the front of the line Comment on Main Line Vo text Instead of placing comment material on a separate com line it is possible to place comments or any type of code directly on the main line using the symbol in brackets Here is an example of this usage CHI I really wish you wouldn t said with strong raising of eyebrows do that You should be careful with using comments on the main line Overuse of this particular notational form can make a transcript difficult to read and analyze Because placing a comment directly onto the main line tends to highlight it this form should be used only for material that is crucial to the understanding of the main line Best Guess Often audiotapes are har
106. es and demonstration analyses that appeared in Sokolov amp Snow 1994 Those exercises form the basis for similar tutorial sections in the current manual Catherine Snow has contributed six major corpora to the database and has conducted CHILDES workshops in a dozen countries Several other colleagues have helped disseminate the CHILDES system through workshops visits and Internet facilities Hidetosi Sirai established a CHILDES file server mirror at Chukyo University in Japan and Steven Gillis established a mirror at the University of Antwerp Steven Gillis Kim Plunkett Johannes Wagner and Sven Str mqvist helped propagate the CHILDES system at universities in Northern and Central Europe Susanne Miyata has brought together a vital group of child language researchers using CHILDES to study the acquisition of Japanese and has supervised the translation of the current manual into Japanese In Italy Elena Pizzuto organized symposia for developing the CHILDES system and has supervised the translation of the manual into Italian Magdalena Smoczynska in Krakow and Wolfgang Dressler in Vienna have helped new researchers who are learning to use CHILDES for languages spoken in Eastern Europe Miquel Serra has supported a series of CHILDES workshops in Barcelona Zhou Jing organized a workshop in Nanjing and Chien ju Chang organized a workshop in Taipei 2 11 Funding From 1984 to 1988 the John D and Catherine T MacArthur Foundation supported the
107. es are given in final ie except for the six common forms doggy kitty piggy potty tummy and dolly Wherever possible use the suffix ie for the diminutive and the suffix y for the adjectivalizer The following table does not include the hundreds of possible diminutives with the ie suffix simply attached to the stem as in eggie footie horsie and so on Nor does it attempt to list forms such as poopy which use the adjectivalizer y attached directly to the stem Words that are marked with an asterisk cannot be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Table 9 Baby Talk byebye goodbye pee wrine urinate Lu gn in do CHAT Manual 53 6 6 15 Word separation in Japanese Many analyses with CLAN relies on words as items In Japanese script Kana Kanji words are traditionally not divided by spaces When transcribing Japanese data in Latin script Romaji as well as in Japanese script Kana Kanji you should add spaces to identify words The WAKACHIO2 system which can be downloaded from the web at http childes psy cmu edu morgrams wakachi2002 zip summarizes the rules for word separation Wakachigaki It is crucial to follow these rules in order to get correct results from MOR automatical morphological analysis or DSS Developmental Sentence Score 6 6 16 Punctuation in French and Italian The standard use of the apostrophe to mark truncation is preserved in French
108. est to use one of the generic age roles like Adult Child or Teenager Then the exact nature of the role can be put in the place of the name as in these examples Participants TBO Toll Booth Operator Adult AIR Airport Attendant Adult SI1 First Sibling Sibling SI2 Second Sibling Sibling OFF MOT to INV OffScript NON Computer Talk Non Human Options CHAT Manual 28 This header is not obligatory but it is frequently needed When it occurs it must follow the Participants line This header allows the checking programs CHECK and the XML validator to suspend certain checking rules for certain file types 1 CA Use of this option suspends the usual requirement for utterance terminators 2 Heritage Use of this option tells CHECK and the validator not to look at the content of the main lines at all This radical blockage of the function of CHECK is only recommended for people working with CA files done in the traditional Jeffersonian format When this option is used text may be placed into italics as in traditional CA 3 Sign Use of this option permits the use of all capitals in words for Sign Language notation 4 IPA Use of this option permits the use of IPA notation on the main line 5 Line Use of this option tells the web browser to expect time marking bullets on each line By default the browser expects a bullet at the end of each tier 6 Multi Use of this option tells the checkers to expect multiple bullets on a sing
109. g this process can be studied most easily by using gem notation The implest form of this system a set of numbers are used for each picture or page of the book Here is an example from the beginning of an Italian file from the Bologna frog story corpus g 1 AND questo e un bimbo poi c e il cane e la rana AND questa e la casa g 2 AND il bimbo dorme The first g marker indicates the first page of the book with the boy the dog and the frog The second g marker indicates the second page of the book with the boy sleeping When using this lazy gem type of marking it is assumed that the beginning of each new gem is the end of the previous gem Programs such as gem and gemlist can then be used to facilitate retrieval of information linked to particular pictures or stimuli 12 3 Written Language CHAT can also be adapted to provide computerized records of written discourse Typically researchers are interested in transcribing two types of written discourse 1 written productions produced by school students and 2 printed texts such as books and newspapers This format is particularly useful for coding written productions by school children In order to use CHAT effectively for this purpose the following adaptations or extensions can be used The basic structure of a CHAT file should be maintained The Begin and End fields should be kept However the Participant line should look like this Participants TEX Writer
110. he acronym CHAT which stands for Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts CHAT is the standard transcription system for the CHILDES Child Language Data Exchange System Project All of the transcripts in the CHILDES database are in CHAT format What makes CHAT particularly powerful is the fact that files transcribed in CHAT can also be analyzed by the CLAN programs that are described in the CLAN manual which is an electronic companion piece to this manual The CHAT programs can track a wide variety of structures compute automatic indices and analyze morphosyntax Moreover because all CHAT files can now also be translated to a highly structured form of XML a language used for text documents on the web they are now also compatible with a wide range of other powerful computer programs such as ELAN Praat EXMARaLDA Phon Transcriber and so on The CHILDES system has had a major impact on the study of child language At the time of the last monitoring in 2003 there were over 2000 published articles that had made use of the programs and database In 2007 the size of the database had grown to over 44 million words making it by far the largest database of conversational interactions available anywhere The total number of researchers who have joined as CHILDES members across the length of the project is now over 4500 Of course not all of these people are making active use of the tools at all times However it is safe to say that at any gi
111. hild invented form c family specific form f or a test word t Note that this usage is only really sanctioned for CHILDES corpora For AphasiaBank corpora neologisms are considered to be forms that have no real word source as is typical in jargon aphasia Nonvoiced forms are produced typically by hearing impaired children or their parents who are mouthing words without making their sounds Onomatopoeias include animal sounds and attempts to imitate natural sounds Phonological consistent forms PCFs are early forms that are phonologically consistent but whose meaning is unclear to the transcriber Usually these forms have some relation to small function words Protomorphemes are forms that will eventually become morphemes including function words and affixes Metalinguistic reference can be used to either cite or quote single standard words or special child forms Second language forms derive from some language not usually used in the home These are marked with a second letter for the first letter of the second language as in Q s zh for Mandarin words inside an English sentence Sign language use can be indicated by the sl Sign and speech use involves making a sign or informal sign in parallel with saying the word Singing can be marked with si Sometimes the phrase that is being sung involves nonwords as in lalaleloo si In other cases it involves words that can be joined by underscores However if a larger passage
112. his passage Augustine claims that he remembered how he had learned language This I remember and have since observed how I learned to speak It was not that my elders taught me words as soon after other learning in any set method but I longing by cries and broken accents and various motions of my limbs to express my thoughts that so I might have my will and yet unable to express all I willed or to whom I willed did myself by the understanding which Thou my God gavest me practise the sounds in my memory When they named anything and as they spoke turned towards it I saw and remembered that they called what they would point out by the name they uttered And that they meant this thing and no other was plain from the motion of their body the natural language as it were of all nations expressed by the countenance glances of the eye gestures of the limbs and tones of the voice indicating the affections of the mind as it pursues possesses rejects or shuns And thus by constantly hearing words as they occurred in various sentences I collected gradually for what they stood and having broken in my mouth to these signs I thereby gave utterance to my will Thus I exchanged with those about me these current signs of our wills and so launched deeper into the stormy CHAT Manual 6 intercourse of human life yet depending on parental authority and the beck of elders Augustine s outline of early word learning drew attention to th
113. iaison and other assimilation effects within the group To mark this the Unicode characters for CHAT Manual 83 2039 and 203A which appear as lt and gt should be entered on both the main and pho lines using F2 lt and F2 gt Orthography Tier ort This tier is used for languages with a non Roman script When Roman script is inserted on the main line this line can be used for the local script Or it can be used in the other way with local script on the main line and Roman on the ort line There should be a one to one correspondence between the items on the two lines Signing Tier sin Parents of deaf children often sign or gesture along with speech as do the children themselves To transcribe this researchers often place the spoken material on the main line and the signed material on the sin line Words on the sin tier can consist of any alphanumberic characters and colons as in forms such as g point toy Like the pho and mor tiers the words on the sin tier must be placed into one to one correspondence with words on the main tier To do this it may be necessary to enter many 0 forms on the sin tier when a word is not matched by a sign or gesture At other times several words on the main tier may align with a single gesture To mark this grouping you can group the forms on the main line with two Unicode bracketing symbols The beginning of the group is marked by Unicode 23A8 1 and the close by Unicode 23A
114. icularly in other languages the transcriber may find it useful to first type in this line as a kind of notepad from which it is then possible to create the main line and the err line Gloss Tier els This tier can be used to provide a translation of the child s utterance into the adult language Unlike the eng tier this tier does not have to be in English It should use an explanation in the target language This tier differs from the flo tier in that it is being used not to simplify the form of the utterance but to explain what might otherwise be unclear Finally this tier differs from the exp tier in that it is not used to clarify deictic reference or the general situation but to provide a target language gloss of immature learner forms Gestural Proxemic Tier V ogpx This tier codes gestural and proxemic material Some transcribers find it helpful to distinguish between general activity that can be coded on the act line and more specifically gestural and proxemic activity such as nodding or reaching which can be coded on the gpx line CHAT Manual 82 Grammatical Relations Tier gra This tier is used to code dependency structures with tagged grammatical relations Sagae Davis Lavie MacWhinney amp Wintner 2007 Sagae Lavie amp MacWhinney 2005 Sagae MacWhinney amp Lavie 2004 For information on the GRASP parser for CHILDES data see the materials at http talkbank org grasp Intonational Ti
115. iesen 1969 1978 have developed a com plete and explicit system for the coding of facial actions This system takes about 100 hours to learn to use and provides extremely detailed coding of the motions of particular muscles in terms of facial action units Kearney and McKenzie 1993 have developed computational tools for the automatic interpretation of emotions using the system of Ekman and Friesen Flow Tier flo This tier codes a flowing version of the transcript that is as free as possible of tran scription conventions and that reflects a minimal number of transcription decisions Here is an example of a flo line CHI lt I do nt gt I do nt wanna want to look in a the badroom bedroom or Bill s room flo I don t I don t wanna look in a badroom or Bill s room Most researchers would agree that the flo line is easier to read than the CHI line However it gains readability by sacrificing precision and utility for computational analy ses The flo line has no records of retracings words are simply repeated There is no regularization to standard morphemes Standard English orthography is used to give a general impression of the nature of phonological errors There is no need to enter this line by hand because there is a clan command that can enter it automatically by comparing the main line to the other coding lines However when dealing with very difficult speech such as that of Wernicke s aphasics part
116. ing as are nonwords such as xxx or strings beginning with amp When word repetitions are marked in the form word x 3 the material in parentheses is stripped off and the word is considered as a single form 5 When a replacing form is indicated on the main line with the form text the material on the mor line corresponds to the replacing material in the square brackets not the material that is being replaced For example if the main line has gonna going to the omor line will code going to 6 The symbol that is used on the main line to indicate errors is not duplicated on the mor line CHAT Manual 106 15 2 Tag Groups and Word Groups On the mor line alternative taggings of a given word are clustered together in tag groups These groups include the alternative taggings of a word that are produced by the MOR program Alternatives are separated by the character Here is an example of a tag group for one of the most ambiguous words in English adv back adj back n back v back After you run the POST program on your files all of these alternatives will be disambiguated and each word will have only one alternative You can also use the hand disambiguation method built into the CLAN editor to disambiguate each tag group case by case The next level of organization for the MOR line is the word group Word groups are combinations marked by the preclitic delimiter the postclitic delimiter or the compound delimiter
117. ion in which you have transcribed hundreds of hours of data in a way that does not match correctly with the input require ments for CLAN 4 4 midCHAT After having learned minCHAT you are ready to learn the basics of CLAN To do this you will want to work through the first chapters of the CLAN manual focusing in CHAT Manual 22 particular on the CLAN tutorial These chapters will take you up to the level of minCLAN which corresponds to the minCHAT level Once you have learned minCHAT and minCLAN you are ready to move on to the next levels which are midCHAT and midCLAN Learning midCHAT involves mastering the transcription of words and conversational features In particular the midCHAT learner should work through the chapters on words utterances and scoped symbols Depending on the shape of the particular project the transcriber may then need to study additional chapters in this manual For people working on large projects that last many months it is a good idea to eventuallly read all of the current manual although some sections that seem less relevant to the project can be skimmed 4 5 The Documentation File CHAT files typically record a conversational sample collected from a particular set of speakers on a particular day Sometimes researchers study a small set of children repeatedly over a long period of time Corpora created using this method are referred to as longitudinal studies For such studies it is best to break up CHAT
118. iption be done from a video recording which should be repeatedly consulted during all phases of analysis When the CLAN editor is used to link transcripts to audio recordings we refer to this as sonic CHAT When the system is used to link transcripts to video recordings we refer to this as video CHAT The CLAN manual explains how to link digital audio and video to transcripts 3 3 Problems With Forced Decisions Transcription and coding systems often force the user to make difficult distinctions For example a system might make a distinction between grammatical ellipsis and ungrammatical omission However it may often be the case that the user cannot decide whether an omission is grammatical or not In that case it may be helpful to have some way of blurring the distinction CHAT has certain symbols that can be used when a categorization cannot be made It is important to remember that many of the CHAT symbols are entirely optional Whenever you feel that you are being forced to make a distinction check the manual to see whether the particular coding choice is actually required If it is not required then simply omit the code altogether 3 4 Transcription and Coding It is important to recognize the difference between transcription and coding Transcription focuses on the production of a written record that can lead us to understand albeit only vaguely the flow of the original interaction Transcription must be done directly off an audiot
119. le line This can be used for data that come from programs like Praat that mark time for each word 7 Caps This option turns off CLAN s restriction against having capital letters inside words 8 Bullets This option turns off the requirement that each time marking bullet should begin after the previous one ID This header is used to control programs such as STATFREQ output to Excel and new programs based on XML The form of this line is ID language corpus code age sex group SES role education custom There must be one ID field for each participant Often you will not care to encode all of this information In that case you can leave some of these fields empty Here is a typical ID header ID en macwhinney CHI 2 10 10 Target_Child To facilitate typing of these headers you can run the CHECK program on a new CHAT file If CHECK does not see ID headers it will use the Participants line to insert a set of ID headers to which you can then add further information Alternatively you can use the INSERT program to create these fields automatically from the information in the Participants line For even more complete control over creation of these ID headers you can use the dialog system that comes up when you have an open CHAT file and select ID Headers under the Tiers Menu pulldown Here is a sample version of this dialog box CHAT Manual 29 Speaker IDs GEO Language eng Corpus name Snyder Name
120. lexical syntactic and discourse analyses also require that these decisions be made clearly and consistently However because of its conceptual simplicity the MLU index places these problems into the sharpest focus The first three forms of transcription all make the basic assumption that there is a single utterance with four morphemes Given the absence of any clear syntactic relation CHAT Manual 56 between the four words it seems difficult to defend use of this form of transcription unless the transcriber explicitly declares that the data should not be used to compute syntactic and sentential measures The fourth form of transcription treats the successive productions of the word milk as repeated attempts to produce a single word This form of transcription makes sense if there is clear evidence that the child was having trouble saying the word If there is no ev idence that the word is really a repetition it would seem best to use the fifth form of tran scription Studies of early child syntax have emphasized the extent to which the child is subject to constraints on utterance length L Bloom amp Lahey 1973 L Bloom Lightbown amp Hood 1975 Gerken 1991 Gerken Landau amp Remez 1990 However if one decides to count all repetitions of single words as full productions it would seem that one is overestimating the degree of syntactic integration being achieved by the child On the other hand some researchers have argued
121. lly generate a Yomor tier from a main tier by using the MOR command At present MOR grammars exist for English French German Hebrew Italian Japanese Cantonese Mandarin and Spanish The grammars for French and German are based on full listings of forms rather than morphological analysis by parts using the minMOR approach The other grammars us the analytic method outlined in the chapter on MOR in the CLAN manual Both types of grammars insert codes using the format described in this chapter 15 1 One to one correspondence MOR creates a mor tier with a one to one correspondence between words on the main line and words on the mor tier In order to achieve this one to one correspondence the following rules are observed 1 Each word group see below on the omor line is surrounded by spaces or an initial tab to correspond to the corresponding space delimited word group on the main line The correspondence matches each Vomor word morphological word to a main line word in a left to right linear order in the utterance 2 Utterance delimiters are preserved on the mor line to facilitate readability and analysis These delimiters should be the same as the ones used on the main line 3 Along with utterance delimiters the satellite markers of t for the vocative and for tag questions or dislocations are also included on the mor line in a one to one alignment format 4 Retracings and repetitions are excluded from this one to one mapp
122. lving a series of words along with occasional commentary about these words We can think of these words as a chain of events in which our convention of writing from left to right represents the temporal sequence of the events During this sequence of words we can also distinguish a variety of local events that do not map onto words There are five types of these local events simple events complex events pauses long events and interposed words 7 8 1 Simple Events In addition to the formalized exclamations given in the chapter on words speakers produce a wide variety of sounds such as cries sneezes and coughs These are indicated in CHAT with the prefix amp in order to produce forms such as amp sneezes and amp yells In order to retrieve these forms consistently we have set up the following standardized spellings Other languages can either use this set or create their own translations of these terms Perhaps the most common of these is amp laughs which can be used to represent all types of laughs chuckles and giggles amp belches amp hisses amp grunts amp whines amp coughs amp hums amp roars amp whistles amp cries amp laughs amp sneezes amp whimpers amp gasps amp moans amp sighs amp yawns amp groans amp mumbles amp sings amp yells amp growls amp pants amp squeals amp vocalizes CHAT Manual 62 It is important to remember that these codes mus
123. m time zero If you only want to track time in minutes and seconds you can use the form minutes seconds as in 09 22 for 9 minutes and 22 seconds MOT where are you Stim 00 00 00 40 pages of transcript follow and then EVE that one Stim 01 20 55 If there is a break in the interaction it may be necessary to establish a new time zero This is done by inserting a new Time Start header You can also use this tier to mark the beginning and end of a time period by using a form such as MOT where are you Stim 04 20 23 04 21 01 9 2 Synchrony Relations For dependent tiers whose codes refer to the entire utterance it is often important to distinguish whether events occur before during or after the utterance Occurrence Before lt bef gt If the comment refers to something that occurred immediately before the utterance in the main line you may use the symbol lt bef gt as in this example MOT it is her turn act lt bef gt moves to the door Occurrence After aft gt If a comment refers to something that occurred immediately after the utterance you may use the form lt aft gt In this example Mother opened the door after she spoke MOT it is her turn MOT go ahead Sact lt aft gt opens the door If neither lt bef gt or lt aft gt are coded it is assumed that the material in the coding tier occurs during the whole utterance or that the exact point of its occurrence during the utterance is
124. marking short quotation stretches inside an utterance the begin quote and end quote double quote symbols can be used If there is a quote embedded inside a quote then mark the internal quote using the single quote begin and end marks Quotation Follows TU During story reading and similar activities a great deal of talk may involve direct quotation In order to mark off this material as quoted a special symbol can be used as in the following example CHI and then the little bear said CHI please give me all of your honey CHI if you do I ll carry you on my back The use of the symbol is linked to the use of the symbol Breaking up quoted material in this way allows us to maintain the rule that each separate utterance should be on a separate line This form of notation is only used when the material being quoted is a complete clause or sentence It is not needed when a few words are being quoted in noncomplement position In those cases use the standard single and double quotation marks described just above Quotation Precedes T5 This symbol is used when the material being directly quoted precedes the main clause as in the following example CHI please give me all of your honey CHI the little bear said 7 10 Utterance Linkers There is another set of symbols that can be used to mark other aspects of the ways in which utterances link together into turns and discourse These symbol
125. mma keys to get the diacritic To insert the superscript h to represent interdental fricative the voiced velar fricative or the interdental emphatic hold down shift F2 and type h When transcribing geminates e g shaddah use double consonants Vowels Name waw bantalon CHAT Manual Consonants Symbol Letter plo XR o up o e OE f e E XL Wu en HEC en pow pe Name hamza ba ta tha jim ha xa dal dhal ra zen shin sin sad dad za ta en gen fa qaf kaf lam mim nun ha waw 90 CHAT Manual 91 12 Specific Applications The basic CHAT codes can be adapted to work with a variety of more specific applications In this chapter we refer four such applications to illustrate the adaptation of the general codes to specific uses A separate document available from this server describes the BTS Berkeley Transcription System for sign language When codes cannot be adapted for specific projects it may be necessary to modify the underlying XML schema for CHAT When this becomes necessary please send email to macw cmu edu 12 1 Code Switching Transcription is easiest when speakers avoid overlaps speak in full utterances and use a single standard language throughout However the real world of conversational interactions is seldom so simple and uniform One particularly challenging type of interaction involves code switching between two or even three different languages In some c
126. mments developed in Edwards 1992 were useful in shaping core aspects of CHAT George Allen 1988 helped developed the UNIBET and PHONASCII systems The workers in the LIPPS Group LIPPS 2000 have developed extensions of CHAT to cover code switching phenomena Adaptations of CHAT to deal with data on disfluencies are developed in Bernstein Ratner Rooney and MacWhinney Bernstein Ratner Rooney amp MacWhinney 1996 The exercises in Chapter 7 of Part II are based on materials originally developed by Barbara Pan for Chapter 2 of Sokolov amp Snow 1994 In the period between 2001 and 2004 we converted much of the CHILDES system to work with the new XML Internet data format This work was begun by Romeo Anghelache and completed by Franklin Chen Support for this major reformatting and the related tightening of the CHAT format came from the NSF TalkBank Infrastructure project which involved a major collaboration with Steven Bird and Mark Liberman of the Linguistic Data Consortium Ongoing work in TalkBank is documented on the web at http talkbank org 2 8 Building CLAN The CLAN program is the brainchild of Leonid Spektor Ideas for particular analysis commands came from several sources Bill Tuthill s HUM package provided ideas about concordance analyses The SALT system of Miller amp Chapman 1983 provided guide lines regarding basic practices in transcription and analysis Clifton Pye s PAL program provided ideas for the MODREP an
127. mmon words have standard shortened forms Some of the most frequent are given in the table that follows The basic notational principle illustrated in that table can be extended to other words as needed All of these words can be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary More extreme types of shortenings include what s th at which becomes sat y ou are which becomes yar and d o you which becomes dyou Representing these forms as shortenings rather than as nonstandard words facilitates standardization and the automatic analysis of transcripts CHAT Manual 48 Two sets of contractions that cause particular problems for morphological analysis in English are final apostrophe s and apostrophe d as in John s and you d If you transcribe these as John ha s and you woul d then the MOR program will work much more efficiently Table 3 Shortenings The marking of shortened forms such as a bout in this way greatly facilitates the later analysis of the transcript while still preserving readability and phonological accuracy Learning to make effective use of this form of transcription is an important part of mastering use of CHAT Underuse of this feature is a common error made by beginning users of CHAT 6 6 8 Assimilations Words such as gonna for going to and whynt cha for why don t you involve complex sound changes often with assimilations between auxiliaries and the infinitive o
128. most projects what is important is not the absolute time but the time of individual events relative to each other This sort of relative timing is provided by coding on the tim dependent tier in conjunction with the Time Start header described next Time Start If you are tracking elapsed time on the tim tier the Time Start header can be used to indicate the absolute time at which the timing marks begin If a new Time Start header is placed in the middle of the transcript this restarts the clock Time Start 12 30 CHAT Manual 32 Transcriber This line identifies the people who transcribed and coded the file Having this indicated is often helpful later when questions arise It also provides a way of acknowledging the people who have taken the time to make the data available for further study Transcription The possible entries here are eye dialect partial full detailed coarse checked Warning This header is used to warn the user about certain defects or peculiarities in the collection and transcription of the data in the file Some typical warnings are as follows 1 These data are not useful for the analysis of overlaps because overlapping was not accurately transcribed 2 These data contain no information regarding the context Therefore they will be inappropriate for many types of analysis 3 Retracings and hesitation phenomena have not been accurately transcribed in these data 4 These data h
129. n MacWhinney Catherine Snow and other child language researchers discussed the possibility of soliciting MacArthur funds to support a data exchange system In January of 1984 the MacArthur Foundation awarded a two year grant to Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow for the establishment of the Child Language Data Exchange System These funds provided for the entry of data into the system and for the convening of a meeting of an advisory board Twenty child language researchers met for three days in Concord Massachusetts and agreed on a basic framework for the CHILDES system which Catherine Snow and Brian MacWhinney would then proceed to implement 2 5 Connectivity Since 1984 when the CHILDES Project began in earnest the world of computers has gone through a series of remarkable revolutions each introducing new opportunities and CHAT Manual 9 challenges The processing power of the home computer now dwarfs the power of the mainframe of the 1980s new machines are now shipped with built in audiovisual capabilities and devices such as CD ROMs and optical disks offer enormous storage capacity at reasonable prices This new hardware has now opened up the possibility for multimedia access to digitized audio and video from links inside the written transcripts In effect a transcript is now the starting point for a new exploratory reality in which the whole interaction is accessible from the transcript Although researchers have just now begun to m
130. n of a video picture taken from a movie as a thumbnail representation of what is happening at a particular moment in the the interaction Text Bullet txt cat jpg CHAT Manual 69 This marker is used to insert a bullet that can be clicked to display a text file 8 2 Paralinguistic Scoping and Events Paralinguistic Material text Paralinguistic events such as coughing laughing or yelling can be marked by using square brackets the symbol a space and then text describing the event CHI that s mine cries This means that the child cries while saying the word mine If the child cries throughout the transcription would be CHI that s mine cries In order to indicate crying with no particular vocalization you should use the amp cries simple form notation discussed earlier as in CHI amp cries This same format of text can also be used to describe prosodic characteristics such as glissando or shouting that are best characterized with full English words Paralinguistic effects such as soft speech yelling singing laughing crying whispering whimpering and whining can also be noted in this way For a full set of these terms and details on their usage see Crystal 1969 or Trager 1958 Here is another example NAO watch out laughing Stressing IM This symbol can be used without accompanying angle brackets to indicate that the preceding wor
131. n of what the speaker said The structure of main lines in CHAT is fairly simple Each main tier line begins with an asterisk After the asterisk there is a three letter speaker ID a colon and a tab The transcription of what was said begins in the ninth column after the tab because the tab stop in the editor is set for the eighth column The remainder of the main tier line is composed primarily of a series of words Words are defined as a series of ASCII characters separated by spaces In this chapter we discuss the principles governing the transcription of words In CLAN all characters that are not punctuation markers are potentially parts of words The default punctuation set includes the space and these characters pe FS 5 cp w None of these characters or the space can be used within words Other non letter char acters such as the plus sign or the at sign can be used within words to express special meanings This punctuation set applies to the main lines and all coding lines with the exception of the pho and omod lines which use the system described in the chapter on Dependent Tiers Because those systems make use of punctuation markers for special characters only the space can be used as a delimiter on the pho and mod lines As the CLAN manual explains this default punctuation set can be changed for particular analyses 6 2 Basic Words Main lines are composed of words and other markers Words are pronounceable forms su
132. n the 1960s regarding new directions in child language research was fueled directly by CHAT Manual 7 the great increase in raw data that was possible through use of tape recordings and typed transcripts This increase in the amount of raw data had an additional seldom discussed conse quence In the period of the baby biography the final published accounts closely resembled the original database of note cards In this sense there was no major gap between the observational database and the published database In the period of typed transcripts a wider gap emerged The size of the transcripts produced in the 60s and 70s made it impossible to publish the full corpora Instead researchers were forced to publish only high level analyses based on data that were not available to others This led to a situation in which the raw empirical database for the field was kept only in private stocks unavailable for general public examination Comments and tallies were written into the margins of ditto master copies and new even less legible copies were then made by thermal production of new ditto masters Each investigator devised a project specific system of transcription and project specific codes As we began to compare hand written and typewritten transcripts problems in transcription methodology coding schemes and cross investigator reliability became more apparent Recognizing this problem Roger Brown took the lead in attempting to share his tran
133. nated with the incompletion marker CHI so after the tower EXP yeah CHI I go straight ahead Other Completion A variant form of the symbol is the symbol which marks latching or the com pletion of another speaker s utterance as in the following example HEL if Bill had known WIN he would have come CHAT Manual 68 8 Scoped Symbols Up to this point the symbols we have discussed are inserted at single points in the transcript They refer to events occurring at particular points during the dialogue There is another major class of symbols that refers not to particular points in the transcript but to stretches of speech These marker symbols are enclosed in square brackets and the material to which they relate can be enclosed in angle brackets The material in the square brackets functions as a descriptor of the material in angle brackets If a scoped symbol applies only to the single word preceding it the angle brackets need not be marked because CLAN considers that the material in square brackets refers to a single preceding word when there are no angle brackets There should be no other material entered between the square brackets and the material to which it refers Depending on the nature of the material in the square brackets the material in the angle brackets may be automatically excluded from certain types of analysis such as MLU counts and so forth Scoped symbols are useful for marking
134. nce Text editing CT Correct provide correct verbal form in place of erroneous one Vocalizations YY Make a word like utterance without clear function OO Unintelligible vocalization Certain other speech act codes that have been widely used in child language research can be encountered in the CHILDES database These general codes should not be combined with the more detailed INCA A codes They include ELAB Elaboration EVAL Evaluation IMIT Imitation NR No Response Q Question REP Repetition N Negation and YN Yes No Question CHAT Manual 99 14 Error Coding Errors are marked by placing the symbol after the error If there is a replacement string such as because that should come before the error code In repetitions and retracing with errors in the initial part of the retracing the symbol is placed before the mark If the error is in the second part of the retracing the symbol goes after the In error coding the form actually produced is placed on the main line and the target form is given on the err line CHAT codes errors by symbols placed after the asterisk in the field This system provides error codes at the word and utterance level 14 1 Word level error codes summary p phonological error p w word p n non word p m methathesis s semantic error S T related word target known s ur unrelated word target known s uk word unknown target s per perseveration n n
135. ndent tier begins after the tab 11 Continuations of main lines and dependent tier lines begin with a tab which is inserted automatically by the CLAN editor 4 2 min CHAT Words and Utterances In addition to these minimum requirements for the form of the file there are certain minimum ways in which utterances and words should be written on the main line 1 Utterances should end with an utterance terminator The basic utterance termi nators are the period the exclamation mark and the question mark 2 Commas can be used as needed to mark phrasal junctions but they are not used by the programs and have no sharp prosodic definition Similarly CHAT Manual 21 3 Use upper case letters only for proper nouns and the word I Do not use upper case letters for the first words of sentences This will facilitate the identification of proper nouns 4 Words should not contain capital letters except at their beginning Words should not contain numbers unless these mark tones Unintelligible words with an unclear phonetic shape should be transcribed as xxx 6 If you wish to note the phonological form of an incomplete or unintelligible pho nological string write it out with an ampersand as in amp guga 7 Incomplete words can be written with the omitted material in parentheses as in be cause and a bout Here is a sample that illustrates these principles This file is syntactically correct and uses the minimum number of CHAT con
136. nt forms such as make believe which is coded as adj v make v believe show that this is not always true In order to preserve the one to one correspondance between words on the main line and words on the mor tier words that are not marked as compounds on the main line should not be coded as compounds on the mor tier For example if the words come here are used as a rote form then they should be written as come here on the main tier On the mor tier this will be coded as v come here It makes no sense to code this as v come adv here because that analysis would contradict the claim that this pair functions as a single unit It is sometimes difficult to assign a part of speech code to a CHAT Manual 111 morpheme In the usual case the part of speech code should be chosen from the same set of codes used to label single words of the language For example some of the these idiomatic phrases can be coded as compounds on the mor line Table 49 Phrases Coded as Linkages adv all of a sudden adv intlkind of adv once and for all advionce upon a time adv so far qnilots of 15 9 Punctuation Marks MOR can be configured to recognize certain punctuation marks as whole word characters In particular the file punct cut contains these entries T scat end end E scat beg beg scat cm cm scatbq bq scat eq eq scat bq bq2 scat eq eq2 When the punctuation marks on
137. nvite Margie Retracing with correction can combine with retracing without correction as in this exam ple CHI the fish is the the fish are swimming Sometimes retracings can become quite complex and lengthy This is particularly true in speakers with language disorders It is important not to underestimate the extent to which retracing goes on in such transcripts By default all of the clan commands except mlu mlt and modrep include retraced material This default can be changed by using the r6 switch Reformulation Sometimes retracings involve full and complete reformulations of the message without any specific corrections Here is an example of this type BET all of my friends had uh we had decided to go home for lunch When none of the material being corrected is included in the retracing it is better to use the marker than the marker False Start Without Retracing CHAT Manual 75 In some projects that place special emphasis on counts of particular disfluency types it may be more convenient to code retracings through a quite different method For example the symbols and are used when a false start is followed by a complete repetition or by a partial repetition with correction If the speaker terminates an incomplete utterance and starts off on a totally new tangent this can be coded by using the symbol BET lt I wanted uh when is Margie coming If
138. ociety for Research in Child Development 40 whole no 2 Bloom P 2000 How children learn the meanings of words Cambridge MA MIT Press Branigan G 1979 Some reasons why successive single word utterances are not Journal of Child Language 6 411 421 Brown R 1973 A first language The early stages Cambridge MA Harvard Chafe W Ed 1980 The Pear stories Cognitive cultural and linguistic aspects of narrative production Norwood NJ Ablex Clark E 1987 The Principle of Contrast A constraint on language acquisition In B MacWhinney Ed Mechanisms of Language Acquisition pp 1 34 Hillsdale NJ Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Crystal D 1969 Prosodic systems and intonation in English Cambridge Cambridge University Press Crystal D 1979 Prosodic development In P Fletcher amp M Garman Eds Language acquisition Studies in first language development New York Cambridge University Press Darwin C 1877 A biographical sketch of an infant Mind 2 292 294 De Houwer A 1990 The acquisition of two languages from birth A case study New York Cambridge University Press Edwards J 1992 Computer methods in child language research four principles for the use of archived data Journal of Child Language 19 435 458 Ekman P amp Friesen W 1969 The repertoire of nonverbal behavior Categories origins usage and coding Semiotica 1 47 98 Ekman P amp Friesen W
139. odes can be given in either uppercase as in ADJ or lowercase as in adj In general CHAT codes are not case sensitive The particular codes given below are the ones that MOR uses for automatic morpho logical tagging of English Individual researchers will need to define a system of part of speech codes that correctly reflects their own research interests and theoretical commit ments Languages that are typologically quite different from English may have to use very different part of speech categories Quirk Greenbaum Leech and Svartvik 1985 explain some of the intricacies of part of speech coding Their analysis should be taken as definitive for all part of speech coding for English However for many purposes a more coarse grained coding can be used The following set of top level part of speech codes is the one used by the MOR pro gram Additional refinements to this system can be found by studying the organization of the lexicon files for that program For example in MOR numbers are coded as types of determiners because this is their typical usage The word back is coded as either a noun verb preposition or adjective Further distinctions can be found by looking at the MOR lexicon CHAT Manual 108 Table 45 Major Parts of Speech Conjunction Determiner Infinitive marker to WH words 15 5 Stems Every word on the mor tier must include a lemma or stem as part of the morpheme analysis The stem is found
140. of the affix should be identified by the following markers or delimiters for a suffix for a prefix and amp for fusional or infixed morphology The amp is used to mark affixes that are not realized in a clearly isolable phonological shape For example the form men cannot be broken down into a part corresponding to the stem man and a part corresponding to the plural marker because one cannot say that the vowel e marks the plural For this reason the word is coded as nlman amp PL The past forms of irregular verbs may undergo similar ablaut processes as in came which is coded v come amp PAST or they may undergo no phonological change at all as in hit which is coded v hit amp PAST Sometimes there may be several codes indicated with the amp after the stem For example the form was is coded v be amp PAST amp I3s Affix and clitic codes are based either on Latin forms for grammatical function or English words corresponding to particular closed class items MOR uses the following set of affix codes for automatic morphological tagging of English Table 46 Inflectional Affixes for English adjective suffix er r ENEERC adjective suffix est st SP CP SP DIM PL 3S vembsufixses 38 O Table 47 Derivational Affixes for English OUT verb prefixout OUT OVER CHAT Manual 110 verb prefix pre PRO 15 7 Clitics Clitics are marked by a tilde as in v pa
141. ometimes use the form donut we are being inconsistent in our representation of this particular word If such inconsistencies are repeated throughout the lexicon computerized analysis will become inaccurate and misleading One of the major goals of CHAT analysis is to maximize systematicity and minimize inconsistency In the Introduction we discussed some of the problems involved in mapping the speech of language learners onto standard adult forms This chapter spells out some rules and heuristics designed to achieve the goal of consistency for word level transcription One solution to this problem would be to avoid the use of words altogether by transcribing everything in phonetic or phonemic notation But this solution would make the transcript difficult to read and analyze A great deal of work in language learning is based on searches for words and combinations of words If we want to conduct these lexical analyses we have to try to match up the child s production to actual words Work in the analysis of syntactic development also requires that the text be analyzed in terms of lexical items Without a clear representation of lexical items and the ways that they diverge from the adult standard it would be impossible to conduct lexical and syntactic analyses computationally Even for those researchers who do not plan to conduct lexical analyses it is extremely difficult to understand the flow of a transcript if no attempt is made to relate the learne
142. on marker to indicate either simple pausing repetition or retracing Note that utterance fragments coded in this way will be counted as complete utterances for analyses such as MLU MLT and CHAINS If your intention is to avoid treating these fragments as complete utterances then you should use the symbol discussed later Trailing Off of a Question Ra If the utterance that is being trailed off has the shape of a question then this symbol should be used Question With Exclamation When a question is produced with great amazement or puzzlement it can be coded using this symbol The utterance is understood to constitute a question syntactically and pragmatically but an exclamation intonationally Interruption This symbol is used for an utterance that is incomplete because one speaker is interrupted by another speaker Here is an example of an interruption MOT what did you SAR Mommy MOT with your spoon CHAT Manual 65 Some researchers may wish to distinguish between an invited interruption and an uninvited interruption An invited interruption may occur when one speaker is prompting his addressee to complete the utterance This should be marked by the symbol for other completion which is given later Uninvited interruptions should be coded with the symbol at the end of the utterance An advantage of using instead of is that programs like MLU are able to piece together the two
143. on the right hand side of the delimiter following any pre clitics or prefixes If the transcript is in English this can be simply the canonical form of the word For nouns this is the singular For verbs it is the infinitive If the transcript is in another language it can be the English translation A single form should be selected for each stem Thus the English indefinite article is coded as det a with the 66 99 lemma a whether or not the actual form of the article is a or an When English is not the main language of the transcript the transcriber must decide whether to use English stems Using English stems has the advantage that it makes the corpus more available to English reading researchers To show how this is done take the German phrase wir essen FRI wir essen mor pro wir we v ess INF eat Some projects may have reasons to avoid using English stems even as translations In this example essen would be simply vless INF Other projects may wish to use only English stems and no target language stems Sometimes there are multiple possible trans CHAT Manual 109 99 66 lations into English For example German Sie sie could be either you she or they Choosing a single English meaning for the stem helps fix the German form 15 6 Affixes Affixes and clitics are coded in the position in which they occur with relation to the stem The morphological status
144. onational stretches such as louder faster and slower can be placed anywhere except inside comments They must be used in pairs to mark the beginning and end of the feature in question The triple wavy symbol z is used to mark a technical break TCU continuation that is done for purposes of improving readability and overlap alignment In this case the triple wavy is placed at the end of the last word of the first segment and then at the beginning of the continuation where it is joined with a plus sign and followed by a space The symbol is used in a parallel way to mark a no break TCU continuation It occurs at the end of the last word of the first segment and in the form with a following space at the beginning of the following line CA transcribers can also use underlining to represent emphasis on a word or a part of a word However if text is taken from a CHAT file to Word the underlining will be lost In general CA marks must occur either inside words or at the beginnings or ends of words In most cases they should not occur by themselves surrounded by spaces The exception to this is the utterance continuator mark which should be preceded by the tab mark and followed by a space In addition to these features that are basic to CA our implementation requires transcribers to begin their transcript with an Begin line and to end it with an End line Comments can be added using the Comment format and transcribers should use the Pa
145. only someone who had actually participated in the community or the interaction could understand the nature of the language and the interactions In some cases these limitations were real and important However all such restrictions on the sharing of data inevitably impede the progress of the scientific study of language learning Within the field of language acquisition studies it is now understood that the advantages of sharing data outweigh the potential dangers The question is no longer whether data should be shared but rather how they can be shared in a reliable and responsible fashion The computerization of transcripts opens up the possibility for many types of data sharing and analysis that otherwise would have been impossible However the full exploitation of this opportunity requires the development of a standardized system for data transcription and analysis 3 2 Words of Caution Before examining the CHAT system we need to consider some dangers involved in computerized transcriptions These dangers arise from the need to compress a complex set of verbal and nonverbal messages into the extremely narrow channel required for the computer In most cases these dangers also exist when one creates a typewritten or hand written transcript Let us look at some of the dangers surrounding the enterprise of transcription 3 2 1 The Dominance of the Written Word Perhaps the greatest danger facing the transcriber is the tendency to treat spok
146. ortened words such as un til and be cause CLAN will treat items that are coded in this way as full words For programs such as FREQ the parentheses will essentially be ignored and be cause will be treated as if it were because The CLAN programs also provide ways of either including or excluding the material in the parentheses depending on the goals of the analysis RAL I been sit ting all day The inclusion or exclusion of material enclosed in parentheses is well supported by CLAN and this same notation can also be used for other purposes when necessary For example studies of fluency may find it convenient to code the number of times that a word is repeated directly on that word as in this example with three repetitions of the word dog JEF that s a dog x 3 By default the programs will remove the x 3 form and the sentence will be treated as a three word utterance This behavior can be modified by using the r switch Omitted Word Oword The coding of word omissions is an extremely difficult and unreliable process Many researchers will prefer not to even open up this particular can of worms On the other hand researchers in language disorders and aphasia often find that the coding of word omissions is crucial to particular theoretical issues In such cases it is important that the coding of omitted words be done in as clear a manner as possible To code an omission the zero symbol is placed before a word on the text tier
147. ple word repetitions For example four repetitions of the word that s are coded as that s x 4 Several of the CLAN programs make use of this notation CHAT Manual 94 3 4 Use of the special form marked fp to explicitly mark even standard English words as filled pauses This use extends also to phrases which are coded as for example you know fp Addition of a special symbol to mark blocks This is the caret placed before the word as in I tend to have blocks early in sentences CHAT Manual 95 13 Speech Act Codes One way of coding speech acts is to separate the component of illocutionary force from those aspects that deal with interchange types One can also distinguish a set of codes that relate to the modality or means of expression Codes of these three types can be placed together on the espa tier One form of coding precedes each code type with an i for illocutionary type Here is an ee identifier such as x for interchange type and example of the combined use of these various codes MOT are you okay spa x dhs Si yq Alternatively one can combine the codes in a hierarchical system so that the previous example would have only the code dhs yq Choice of different forms for codes depends on the goals of the analysis the structure of the coding system and the way the codes interface with clan Users will often need to construct their own coding schemes However one scheme
148. purpose coding tier It can be used for mixing codes into a single tier for economy or ease of entry Here is an example MOT you want Mommy to do it cod SMLU 6 NMV 2 S RDE SEXP Cohesion Tier coh This tier is used to code text cohesion devices Comment Tier com This is the general purpose comment tier One of its many uses is to note occurrence of a particular construction type as in this example EVE that s nasty is it com note tag question Notations on this line should usually be in common English words rather than codes If special symbols and codes are included they should be placed in quotation marks so that check does not flag them as errors Definitions Tier def This tier is needed only for files that are reformatted from the SALT system by the saltin command English Rendition Tier Yoeng This line provides a fluent nonmorphemicized English translation for non English data MAR yo no tengo nada eng I don t have anything Error coding Tier S oerr This tier codes additional information about errors that cannot be fully expressed on the main line Explanation Tier Yoexp This tier is useful for specifying the deictic identity of objects or individuals Brief explanations can also appear on the main line enclosed in square brackets and preceded by the sign and followed by a space CHAT Manual 81 Facial Gesture Tier fac This tier codes facial actions Ekman amp Fr
149. r a pronoun For forms of this type CHAT allows the transcriber to place the assimilated form on the main line followed by a fuller form in square brackets as in the form gonna going to CLAN allows the user to either analyze the material preceding the brackets or the ma terial following the brackets as described in the section of the chapter on options that dis cusses the r switch An extremely incomplete list of assimilated forms is given below None of these forms can be found in Webster s Third New International Dictionary CHAT Manual 49 Table 4 Assimilations gotta sort of E ee Xp neg If you transcribe these forms as single morphemes they will be counted as single morphemes and programs like MOR will recognize them as wholes If you do not believe that they are morphemic units you can break them up into components in two ways First forms involving alterations of you can be represented by having ya chu and cha as alternative spellings for you Second you can analyze these forms using the replacement notation Thus transcribers can choose to either enter could cha or couldcha could you If you have chosen to represent you as ya you must remember to include ya in your search lists Another way of representing some of these forms is by noting omitted letters with parentheses as in gi ve me for gimme le t me for lemme or d o you for dyou However this method is not good
150. r s sounds to items in the adult language At the same time attempts to force adult lexical forms onto learner forms can seriously misrepresent the data The solution to this problem is to devise ways to indicate the various types of divergences between learner forms and adult standard forms Note that we use the term divergences rather than error Although both learners MaeWhinney amp Osser 1977 and adults Stemberger 1985 clearly do make errors most of the divergences between learner forms and adult forms are due to structural aspects of the learner s system This chapter discusses the various tools that CHAT provides to mark some of these divergences of child forms from adult standards The basic types of codes for divergences that we discuss are 1 special learner form markers codes for unidentifiable material codes for incomplete words ways of treating formulaic use of words and conventions for standardized spellings For loguases such as English Spanish and Japanese we now have complete MOR grammars The lexicons used by these grammars constitute the definitive current CHAT standard for words Please take a look at the relevant lexical files since they illustrate in great detail the overall principles we are describing in this chapter WR WN CHAT Manual 37 6 1 The Main Line The word forms we will be discussing here are the principal components of the main line This line gives the basic transcriptio
151. r which the target is not known add x n as the target word after the error CHAT Manual 103 Examples PAR I ve only gone to two Jesiz u x n n uk PAR if I could fierv u x n n uk it I guess I can bieem u x n n uk it n k s the error is a recurring non word for which the target is known n uk s the error is a recurring non word for which the target is not known add x n as the target word after the error Oword Missing word errors Oart Oaux etc missing word or part of speech CHAT transcript examples PAR and that Ov cop what Oart peanut butter sandwich is PAR the boy Oaux falling 14 3 Utterance level error coding post codes gram grammatical error per perseveration jar jargon 4 cir circumlocution es empty speech Grammatical error gram includes agrammatic and paragrammatic utterances e telegraphic speech e speech in which content words mainly nouns verbs and adjectives are relatively preserved but many function words articles prepositions conjunctions are missing adapted from Brookshire 1997 e utterances with frank grammatical errors without requiring that each utterance be a complete sentence with a subject and predicate e utterances with errors in word order syntactic structure or grammatical morphology Butterworth and Howard 1987 e utterance level grammatical errors as opposed to word level agreement errors or mis
152. r whose lexical status is vague For example how should letters be spelled What about numbers and titles What is the best spelling doggy or doggie yeah or yah and pst or pss If we can increase the consistency with which such forms are transcribed we can improve the quality of automatic lexical analyses clan commands such as freq and combo provide output based on searches for particular word strings If a word is spelled in an indeterminate number of variant ways researchers who attempt to analyze the occurrence of that word will inevitably end up with inaccurate results For example if a researcher wants to trace the use of the pronoun you it might be necessary to search not only for you ya and yah but also for all the assimilations of the pronouns with verbs such as didya dicha didcha or couldya couldcha coucha Without a standard set of rules for the transcription of such forms accurate lexical searches could become impossible On the other hand there is no reason to avoid using these forms if a set of standards can be established for their use Other programs rely on the use of dictionaries of words If the spellings of words are indeterminate the analyses produced will be equally indeterminate For that reason it is helpful to specify a set of standard spellings for marginal words This section lists some of these words with their standard orthographic form The forms in these lists all have some conventional lexical status in stan
153. rl amp IMP 2S speak pro DAT MASC SG for Italian parlagli and projit v be amp 3s for English it s Note that part of speech coding with the symbol is repeated for clitics after the tilde Both clitics and contracted elements are coded with the tilde The use of the tilde for contracted elements extends to forms like sul in Italian ins in German or rajta in Hungarian in which prepositions are merged with articles or pronouns Table 48 Clitic Codes for English v aux would v have amp PAST TI noun phrase post clitic v aux will noun phrase post clitic n v lbe amp 1S v aux be amp 1S v be amp PRES v aux be amp PRES noun phrase post clitic s v be amp 3S v aux be amp 3S verbal post clitic n t neg not 15 8 Compounds Here are some words that we might want to treat as compounds sweat shirt tennis court bathing suit high school playground choo choo train rock n roll and sitt in There are also many idiomatic phrases that could be best analyzed as linkages Here are some examples a ot of all of a sudden at last for sure kind of of course once and for all once upon a time so far and lots of On the mor tier it is necessary to assign a part of speech label to each segment of the compound For example the word blackboard or black board is coded on the mor tier as n adj black n board Although the part of speech of the compound as a whole is usually given by the part of speech of the final segme
154. rm of notation is useful when the speaker stutters or breaks off before completing a recognizable word false starts The utterance t t c can t you go is transcribed as follows MAR amp t amp t amp k can t you go The ampersand can also be used for nonce and nonsense forms DAN amp glnk amp glnk com weird noises Material following the ampersand symbol will be ignored by certain CLAN commands such as MLU which computes the mean length of the utterance in a transcript If you want to have the material treated as a word use the u form of notation instead see the previous section CHAT Manual 43 Unless you specifically attempt to search for strings with the ampersand the CLAN commands will not see them at all If you want a command such as FREQ to count all of the instances of phonological fragments you would have to add a switch such as s amp 6 5 Incomplete and Omitted Words Words may also be incomplete or even fully omitted We can judge a word to be incomplete when enough of it is produced for us to be sure what was intended Judging a word to be omitted is often much more difficult Noncompletion of a Word text text text When a word is incomplete but the intended meaning seems clear insert the missing material within parentheses Do not use this notation for fully omitted words only for words with partial omissions This notation can also be used to derive a consistent spelling for commonly sh
155. rovides codes for marking lengthening and pausing within words For marking features such as stressing and pitch rise and fall transcribers should rely on the CHAT CA marks indicated above and provided in Chapter 10 In addition to those symbols the following symbols are also available Primary Stress The Unicode symbol U02C8 can be used to mark primary stress It is placed right before the stressed syllable as in this example MOT baby want ba na nas Secondary Stress The Unicode symbol U02CC can be used to mark secondary stress It is placed right before the stressed syllable as in this example MOT baby want ba na nas Lengthened Syllable CHAT Manual 61 A colon within a word indicates the lengthening or drawling of a syllable as in this example MOT baby want bana nas Pause Between Syllables A pause between syllables may be indicated as in this example MOT is that a rhi noceros There is no special CHAT symbol for a filled pause Instead words like uh and um are used to mark filled pauses Their specific form is given in the lexicon for the MOR program Blocking A Speakers with marked language disfluencies often engage in a form of word attack known as blocking Bernstein Ratner Rooney amp MacWhinney 1996 This form of word attack is marked by a caret or up arrow placed directly before the word 7 6 Local Events We tend to think of the basic form of a transcript as invo
156. rrounded by spaces Most words are entered just as they are found in the dictionary The first word of a sentence is not capitalized unless it is a proper noun 6 3 Special Form Markers Special form markers can be placed at the end of a word To do this the symbol is used in conjunction with one or two additional letters Here is an example of the use of the symbol SAR I got a bingbing c Here the child has invented the form bingbing to refer to a toy The word bingbing is not in the dictionary and must be treated as a special form To further clarify the use of these c forms the transcriber should create a file called Olexicon cdc that provides glosses for such forms The c form illustrated in this example is only one of many possible special form markers that can be devised The following table lists some of these markers that we have found useful However this categorization system is meant only to be suggestive not ex haustive Researchers may wish to add further distinctions or ignore some of the categories listed The particular choice of markers and the decision to code a word with a CHAT Manual 38 marker form is one that is made by the transcriber not by CHAT The basic idea is that CLAN will treat words marked with the special learner form markers as words and not as fragments In addition the MOR program will not attempt to analyze special forms for part of speech Table 2 Special Form Markers Ga
157. rticipants header in this form Participants geo mom tim This line uses only three letter codes for participant names By adding this line it is pos sible to have quicker entry of speaker codes inside the editor In order to facilitate the translation of CHAT files back into CA using the CHAT2CA program some additional symbols are added to the CHAT files These include for the CA beginning latch mark and for missing final delimiters These codes are noted in the chapter on terminators CHAT Manual 89 11 Arabic Transcription In order to transcribe Arabic in Roman characters the SemTalk group has devised the following coding system This system and related materials on the acquisition of Arabic Hebrew and other Semitic languages can be found at semtalk talkbank org The transcription conventions for Arabic were set by the following people Hanan Asaad Haifa University Abbassia Bouhaous University of Heidelberg Amal Kadry Bar Ilan University Lior Laks Tel Aviv University Bracha Nir Sagiv Tel Aviv University Fatena Omar Haifa University Sigal Uziel Karl Haifa University The following charts list the Arabic transcription symbols To use the special symbols the latest CHILDES Unicode version has to be installed Once this is done the symbols with the diacritics can be inserted as follows To insert the diacritic representing pharyngeals type any of the requested letter s and then press the F2 and co
158. s Name Text CHAT Manual 93 Each written sentence should be transcribed on a separate line with the TEX field at the beginning Additional Comment and Situation fields can be added to add descriptive details about the writing assignment and other relevant information For research projects that do not demand a high degree of accurate rendition of the actual form of the written words it is sufficient to transcribe the words on the main line in normalized standard language orthographic form However if the researcher wants to track the development of punctuation and orthography the normalized main line should be supplemented with a spe line Here are some examples TEX Each of us wanted to get going home before the Steeler s game let out spe etch of us wanted too git goin home be fore the Stillers game let out O In this example the student had written ofus without a space and had incorrectly placed a space in the middle of before The slash at the beginning of a word marks an omission and the internal slash marks an extra space These two marks are used to achieve one to one alignment between the main line and the spe line This alignment can be used to facilitate the use of MODREP in the analysis of orthographic errors It will also be used in the future by programs that perform automatic comparisons between the main line and the spe line to diagnose error types The only purpose of the spe line is to code word
159. s are not utterance terminators but utterance initiators or rather linkers They indicate various ways in which an utterance fits in with an earlier utterance Each of these symbols begins with the sign Quoted Utterance 4 This symbol is used in conjunction with the and symbols discussed earlier It is placed at the beginning of an utterance that is being directly quoted Quick Uptake CHAT Manual 67 Sometimes an utterance of one speaker follows quickly on the heels of the last utterance of the preceding speaker without the customary short pause between utterances An example of this is MOT why did you go SAR I really didn t Lazy Overlap lt If you don t want to mark the exact beginning and end of overlaps between speakers and only want to indicate the fact that two turns overlap you can use this code at the beginning of the utterance that overlaps a previous utterance as in this example CHI we were taking them home MOT lt they had to go in here This marking simply indicate that the mother s utterance overlaps the previous child utterance It does not indicate how much of the two utterances overlap Self Completion The symbol can be used at the beginning of a main tier line to mark the completion of an utterance after an interruption In the following example it marks the completion of an utterance by CHI after interruption by EXP Note that the incompleted utterance must be termi
160. s not want to transcribe For example it could be that the material is in a language that the transcriber does not know This symbol can also be used when a speaker says something that has no relevance to the interactions taking place and the experimenter would rather ignore it For example www could indicate a long conversation between adults that would be superfluous to transcribe Here is an example of the use of this symbol MOT www Sexp talks to neighbor on the telephone Actions Without Speech 0 This symbol is used when the speaker performs some action that is not accompanied by speech Notice that the symbol is the numeral zero 0 not the capital letter O Here is an example of the correct usage of this symbol FAT where s your doll DAV O runs over to her closet If the transcriber wishes to code the phonetics of the crying it would be better to insert yyy on the main tier Do not use the zero if there is any speech on the tier The zero can also be used to provide a place to attach a dependent tier Phonological Fragment amp The amp symbol can be used at the beginning of a string to indicate that the following material is just a phonological fragment or piece of a word and that CLAN should not treat it as a word It is important not to include any of the three utterance terminators the exclamation mark the question mark or the period because CLAN will treat these as utterance terminators This fo
161. s should avoid using other separators because most of them have special meanings in CHAT For example when attached directly to the end of a word the dash CHAT Manual 60 means incompletion Therefore it should not be used to mark appositives or other parenthetical material as in standard written practice 7 6 Tone Direction Earlier versions of CHAT had used a special set of terminating tone units such as and In order to bring CHAT more into accord with standard practice we have shifted to a reliance on marks such as f for rising All the other CA marks can also be used in CHAT files However unlike CA CHAT requires that every utterance have a final delimiter This means that CA and CHAT are in agreement in assuming that final question mark includes a rising intonation final exclamation mark represents emphatic intonation and that final period represents a final fall In addition CHAT assumes that the question mark is used with questions that the exclamation mark is used with exclamations and that the period terminates declarative sentences Sometimes questions do not end in a rising intonation In that case the actual intonation used can be marked with the falling mark after the final word then followed by the question mark as in this example MOT Are you going to store Final rise fall contour can be represented with 1 and final fall rise can be represented with f 7 7 Prosody Within Words CHAT also p
162. s should run each file through the CHECK program The CHECK command can be run directly inside the editor so that you can verify the accuracy of your transcription as you are producing it CHECK will detect errors such as failure to start lines with the correct symbols use of incorrect speaker codes or missing Begin and End symbols CHECK can also be used to find errors in CHAT coding beyond those discussed in this chapter Using CHECK is like brushing your teeth It may be hard at first to remember to use the command but the more you use it the easier it becomes and the better the final results CHAT Manual 24 5 File Headers The three major components of a CHAT transcript are the file headers the main tier and the dependent tiers In this chapter we discuss creating the first major component the file headers A computerized transcript in CHAT format begins with a series of header lines which tells us about things such as the date of the recording the names of the participants the ages of the participants the setting of the interaction and so forth A header is a line of text that gives information about the participants and the setting All headers begin with the sign Some headers require nothing more than the sign and the header name These are bare headers such as Begin or New Episode How ever most headers require that there be some additional material This additional material is called an entry Header
163. s that take entries must have a colon which is then followed by one or two tabs and the required entry By default tabs are usually understood to be placed at eight character intervals The material up to the colon is called the header name In the example following Media and Date are both header names Media abe88 movie Date 25 JAN 1983 The text that follows the header name is called the header entry Here abe88 movie and 25 JAN 1983 are the header entries The header name and the header entry together are called the header line The header line should never have a punctuation mark at the end In CHAT only utterances actually spoken by the subjects receive final punctuation This chapter presents a set of headers that researchers have considered important Except for the Begin Languages Participants ID and End headers none of the headers are required and you should feel free to use only those headers that you feel are needed for the accurate documentation of your corpus 5 1 Hidden Headers CHAT uses five types of headers hidden initial participant specific constant and changeable In the editor CHAT files appear to begin with the Begin header However there are actually three hidden headers that appear before this header These are the Font header the UTF8 header and the ColorWords which appear in that order Font This header is used to set the default font for the
164. se phonetically Second the editor allows the user to link the digitized audio record of the interaction directly to the transcript This is the system called sonic CHAT With these sonic CHAT links it is possible to double click on a sentence and hear its sound immediately Having the actual sound produced by the child directly available in the transcript takes some of the burden off of the transcription system However whenever computerized analyses are based not on the original audio signal but on transcribed orthographic forms one must continue to understand the limits of transcription conventions Third for those who wish to avoid the work involved in IPA transcription or sonic CHAT that is a system for using nonstandard lexical forms that the form might h ave would be universally recognized as the spelling of mightof the contracted form of might have More extreme cases of phonological variation can be annotated as in this example popo hippopotamus 3 2 2 The Misuse of Standard Punctuation Transcribers have a tendency to write out spoken language with the punctuation con ventions of written language Written language is organized into clauses and sentences delimited by commas periods and other marks of punctuation Spoken language on the other hand is organized into tone units clustered about a tonal nucleus and delineated by pauses and tonal contours Crystal 1969 1979 Halliday 1966 1967 1968 Work on the
165. sing parts of speech CHAT transcript examples PAR one two bread 4 gram PAR whatever I m think up gram PAR I don t think that they re not supposed to be doing that gram PAR what d he put it to me gram CHAT Manual 104 PAR they were knowing them and they didn t know what was going on either too gram PAR is getting want to be wasn t gram PAR when everything that we going out now gram Jargon jar mostly fluent and prosodically correct but largely meaningless speech containing paraphasias neologisms or unintelligible strings resembles English syntax and inflection adapted from Kertesz 2007 PAR go and amp ha hack s uk the gets s uk be able gable s uk get amp su sim u x n n uk jar PAR get this care s uk ret kexf u xn n uk to eat here jar PAR and xxx 4 jar Empty speech es speech that is syntactically correct but conveys little or no overall meaning often a result of substituting general words e g thing stuff for more specific words Brookshire 1997 Differentiating among empty speech jargon and grammatical error codes may be challenging In truth all these sentences may be meaningless in the conversational context Briefly empty speech utterances should contain general vague unspecific referents but be syntactically correct jargon utterances should contain paraphasias and or neologisms
166. ss it is clear that the utterance was a question or a command Speech XXX Use the symbol xxx when you cannot hear or understand what the speaker is saying If you believe you can distinguish the number of unintelligible words you may use several xxx strings in a row Here is an example of the use of the xxx symbol SAR XXX MOT what SAR I want xx Sarah s first utterance is fully unintelligible Her second utterance includes some unintelligible material along with some intelligible material The MLU and MLT commands will ignore the xxx symbol when computing mean length of utterance and other statistics If you want to have several words included use as many occurrences of xx as you wish Phonological Coding yyy Use the symbol yyy when you plan to code all material phonologically on a 9opho line If you are not consistently creating a pho line in which each word is transcribed in IPA in the order of the main line you should use the u or amp notations instead Here is an example of the use of yyy SAR YYY YYY a ball gpho ta g bal The first two words cannot be matched to particular words but their phonological form is given on the pho line Untranscribed Material WWW CHAT Manual 42 This symbol must be used in conjunction with an exp tier which is discussed in the chapter on dependent tiers This symbol is used on the main line to indicate material that a transcriber does not know how to transcribe or doe
167. t fully characterize complete local events If your intention is to mark that a stretch of words has been mumbled then you should use the scoped codes discussed in the next chapter However if you only wish to code that some mumbling or singing occurs at a particular point then you can use this simpler form Simple event forms can also be used to mark actions such as running and reading When these actions are transitive they can also take an object imit point and move For example a very common vocalizer is amp imit motor for an imitation of the sound of a motor The table below illustrates this use of compound simple codes amp imit motor amp writes amp points car amp imit plane amp reads amp points nose amp imit lion amp walks door amp turns page amp imit baby amp runs door amp hits table amp ges ignore amp eats amp ges unsure amp drinks amp ges come The object of the amp imit codes indicate the noise source being imitated vocally The objects of the amp ges codes indicate the meaning of the gestures being used The objects of activities such as amp walk and amp run indicate the direction or goal of the walking or running For actions such as amp slurp and amp eat the code represents the auditory results of the slurping or eating Finally you can compose codes using parts of the body as in amp head yes to indicate nodding yes with the h
168. t of speech a word belongs to we offer the following overview of the different part of speech labels used in the standard English grammar Adjectives modify nouns either prenominally or predicatively Unitary compound modifiers such as good looking should be labeled as adjectives Adverbs cover a heterogenous class of words including manner adverbs which generally end in ly locative adverbs which include expressions of time and place intensifiers that modify adjectives and post head modifiers such as indeed and enough Communicators are used for interactive and communicative forms which fulfill a variety of functions in speech and conversation Many of these are formulaic expressions such as hello good morning good bye please thank you Also included in this category are words used to express emotion as well as imitative and onomatopeic forms such as ah aw boom boom boom icky wow yuck and yummy Conjunctions conjoin two or more words phrases or sentences Coordinating conjunc tions include and but or and yet Subordinating conjunctions include although because if unless and until Determiners include articles and definite and indefinite determiners Possessive deter miners such as my and your are tagged det poss The Infinitive marker is the word to which is tagged inf to Nouns are tagged with n for common nouns and n prop for proper nouns names of people places fictional characters brand
169. ted computer phonecall telechat meeting work medical classroom tutorial private family sports religious legal face to face Location This header should include the city state or province and country in which the interaction took place Here is an example of a completed header line Location Boston MA USA CHAT Manual 31 Number The possible entries here include two three four five more audience Recording Quality Possible entries here are poor fair good and excellent Room Layout This header outlines room configuration and positioning of furniture This is especially useful for experimental settings The entry should be a description of the room and its contents Here is an example of the completed header line Room Layout Kitchen Table in center of room with window on west wall door to outside on north wall Tape Location This header indicates the specific tape ID side and footage This is very important for identifying the tape from which the transcription was made The entry for this header should include the tape ID side and footage Here is an example of this header Tape Location tape74 side a 104 Time Duration It is often necessary to indicate the time at which the audiotaping began and the amount of time that passed during the course of the taping as in the following header Time Duration 12 30 13 30 This header provides the absolute time during which the taping occurred For
170. thy for hearer s distress Exclaim in distress pain Express positive emotion Express surprise Mark occurrence of event thank greet apologize congratulate etc Mark transfer of object to hearer Exhibit attentiveness to hearer Agree with proposition or proposal expressed by previous speaker Count Disagree with proposition expressed by previous speaker Make a declarative statement CHAT Manual 98 WS Express a wish Questions AQ Aggravated question expression of disapproval by restating a question AA Answer in the affirmative to yes no question AN Answer in the negative to yes no question EQ Eliciting question e g hmm NA Intentionally nonsatisfying answer to question QA Answer a question with a wh question QN Ask a product question wh question RA Refuse to answer SA Answer a wh question with a statement TA Answer a limited alternative question TQ Ask a limited alternative yes no question YQ Ask a yes no question YA Answer a question with a yes no question Performances PR Perform verbal move in game TX Read or recite written text aloud Evaluations AB Approve of appropriate behavior CR Criticize or point out error in nonverbal act DS Disapprove scold protest disruptive behavior ED Exclaim in disapproval ET Express enthusiasm for hearer s performance PM Praise for motor acts i e for nonverbal behavior Demands for clarification RR Request to repeat uttera
171. tinction is somewhat arbitrary and incomplete Whenever a child invented form is clearly onomatopoeic use the o coding instead of the c coding A fuller characterization of neologisms can be provided by the error coding system presented in a separate chapter If transcribers find it difficult to distinguish between child invented forms onomato poeia and familial forms they can use the symbol without any following letter In this way they can at least indicate the fact that the preceding word is not a standard item in the adult lexicon CHAT Manual 41 6 4 Unidentifiable Material Sometimes it is difficult to map a sound or group of sounds onto either a conventional word or a non conventional word This can occur when the audio signal is so weak or garbled that you cannot even identify the sounds being used At other times you can recognize the sounds that the speaker is using but cannot map the sounds onto words Sometimes you may choose not to transcribe a passage because it is irrelevant to the interaction Sometimes the person makes a noise or performs an action instead of speaking and sometimes a person breaks off before completing a recognizable word All of these problems can be dealt with by using certain special symbols for those items that cannot be easily related to words These symbols are typed in lower case and are preceded and followed by spaces When standing alone on a text tier they should be followed by a period unle
172. tion of conversational turns and sequencing It is now used by hundreds of researchers internationally to study conversational behavior Recent applications and formulations of this approach can be found in Ochs Schegloff and Thompson 1996 as well as the related GAT formulation of Selting 1998 Workers in this tradition find CA notation easier to use than CHAT because the conventions of this system provide a clearer mapping of features of conversational sequencing On the other hand CA transcription has limits in terms of its ability to represent conventional morphemes orthography and syntactic patterns By supplementing CHAT transcription on the word level with additional utterance level codes for CA the strengths of both systems can be maintained To achieve this merger some of the forms of both CHAT and CA must be modified To implement CA format CHAT CA uses these functions The fact that a transcript is using CA notation is indicated by inserting the term CA in the Options header Older corpora can be maintained in their original non CHAT format by entering the word heritage on the Options header tier before the WID tiers e Utterances and inter TCU pauses are numbered by the automatic line numbering function Line numbers can be turned on and off for viewing and printing by using CLAN options Line numbers are not stored by themselves in CHAT although they are encoded in the XML version of CHAT e After the line n
173. umber comes an asterisk and then the speaker ID code and a colon and a tab as in CHAT format Tabs are not used elsewhere e CA Overlaps as marked with the special symbols and are aligned automatically by the INDENT program so hand indentation is not needed To maintain proper alignment CLAN uses a special fixed width Unicode font CHAT requires obligatory utterance terminators However CA uses terminal contours instead as noted in the table below and these are optional Instead of marking comments in double parentheses CHAT uses the 9o com notation However common sounds gestures and activities occurring at a point in an utterance are marked using the amp gesture form CHAT uses the following four forms for marking disfluencies These can be used optionally in CA too but the only standard CA form for breaking off is the dash at the end of the word as in I was go This breaking off marker can be used along with the CHAT forms too o amp b boy for stuttering and word fragments o string string for word or phrase repetition o string string for retracing O for trailing off CHAT Manual CHAT headers such as these QBegin and End Using these guarantees that the file is complete OAN OOK ON 87 In addition to these basic utterance level CA forms CHAT CA requires the standard e Comment This is a useful general purpose field Bg Eg These mark gems for later retrieval e
174. utterance In order to avoid having to make these decisions after the fact one can simply enter it in an Bck header Bck Rachel was fussing and pointing toward the cabinet where the cookies are stored RAC cookie cookie Bg and Bg These headers are used to mark the beginning of a gem for analysis by GEM If there is a colon you must follow the colon with a tab and then one or more code words Blank This header is created by the TEXTIN program It is used to represent the fact that some written text includes a blank line or new paragraph It should not be used for transcripts of spoken language Comment This header can be used as an all purpose comment line Any type of comment can be entered on an Comment line When the comment refers to a particular utterance use the com line When the comment refers to more general material use the Comment header If the comment is intended to apply to the file as a whole place the Comment header along with the constant headers before the first utterance Instead of trying to make up a new coding tier name such as Gestational Age for a special purpose type of information it is best to use the Comment field as in this example Comment Gestational age of MAR is 7 months Comment Birthweight of MAR is 6 lbs 4 oz Another example of a special Comment field is used in the diary notes of the MacWhinney corpus where they have this shape Comment Diary Brian
175. ve generously shared their valuable data with the whole research com munity The growing size of the database for language impairments adult aphasia and CHAT Manual 11 second language acquisition indicates that these related areas have also begun to understand the value of data sharing Many of the corpora contributed to the system were transcribed before the formulation of CHAT In order to create a uniform database we had to reformat these corpora into CHAT Jane Desimone Mary MacWhinney Jane Morrison Kim Roth Kelley Sacco and Gergely Sikuta worked many long hours on this task Steven Gillis Helmut Feldweg Susan Powers and Heike Behrens supervised a parallel effort with the German and Dutch data sets Because of the continually changing shape of the programs and the database keeping this manual up to date has been an ongoing activity In this process I received help from Mike Blackwell Julia Evans Kris Loh Mary MacWhinney Lucy Hewson Kelley Sacco and Gergely Sikuta Barbara Pan Jeff Sokolov and Pam Rollins also provided a reading of the final draft of the 1995 version of the manual 2 10 Disseminating CHILDES Since the beginning of the project Catherine Snow has continually played a pivotal role in shaping policy building the database organizing workshops and determining the shape of CHAT and CLAN Catherine Snow collaborated with Jeffrey Sokolov Pam Rollins and Barbara Pan to construct a series of tutorial exercis
176. ven point in time approximately 100 groups of researchers around the world are involved in new data collection and transcription using the CHAT system Eventually the data collected in these various projects will all be contributed to the database 3 1 Computerization Public inspection of experimental data is a crucial prerequisite for serious scientific progress Imagine how genetics would function if every experimenter had his or her own individual strain of peas or drosophila and refused to allow them to be tested by other ex perimenters What would happen in geology if every scientist kept his or her own set of rock specimens and refused to compare them with those of other researchers In some fields the basic phenomena in question are so clearly open to public inspection that this is not a problem The basic facts of planetary motion are open for all to see as are the basic facts underlying Newtonian mechanics Unfortunately in language studies a free and open sharing and exchange of data has not always been the norm In earlier decades researchers jealously guarded their field CHAT Manual 15 notes from a particular language community of subject type refusing to share them openly with the broader community Various justifications were given for this practice It was sometimes claimed that other researchers would not fully appreciate the nature of the data or that they might misrepresent crucial patterns Sometimes it was claimed that
177. ventions while still maintaining compatibility with the CLAN commands CA Begin Languages eng Participants CHI Ross Child FAT Brian Father ID eng macwhinney CHI 2 10 10 Target_Child ID eng macwhinney FAT 35 2 Target_Child ROS why isn t Mommy coming com Mother usually picks Ross up around 4 PM FAT don t worry FAT she ll be here soon CHI good End 4 3 Analyzing One Small File For researchers who are just now beginning to use CHAT and CLAN there is one single suggestion that can potentially save literally hundreds of hours of wasted time The suggestion is to transcribe and analyze one single small file completely and perfectly before launching a major effort in transcription and analysis The idea is that you should learn just enough about minCHAT and minCLAN to see your path through these four crucial steps 1 entry of a small set of your data into a CHAT file 2 successful running of the CHECK command inside the editor to guarantee accu racy in your CHAT file 3 development of a series of codes that will interface with the particular CLAN commands most appropriate for your analysis and 4 running of the relevant CLAN commands so that you can be sure that the results you will get will properly test the hypotheses you wish to develop If you go through these steps first you can guarantee in advance the successful outcome of your project You can avoid ending up in a situat
178. zing the transcript will simply need to include the variant in their search lists An example of an exception to this is den for then because den is already the standard word for an animal s burrow A second solution to this problem is to follow each variant form with the standard form as given below using the replacement notation A third solution is to create a full phonological transcription of the whole interaction linked to a full sonic CHAT digitized audio record In transcripts where the speakers have strong dialectal influences this is probably the best solution The fourth solution is to ignore the dialectal variation and simply transcribe the standard form If this is being done the practice must be clearly noted in the readme file None of these forms are in Webster s Third New International Dictionary Table 8 Dialectal Variants Standard Standard CHAT Manual 52 da te nuin nothing de the tagether together deir their weuz we E AE TITRES stu E RE den then yl youal dee thee ye your dey thy yose youal a ep ue E om hisef himslf 6 6 14 Baby Talk Baby talk or caregiverese forms include onomatopoeic words such as choochoo and diminutives such as froggie or thingie In the following table diminutiv

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