The Childes Project

Book excerpt: Volume I is the first of two volumes that document the three components of the CHILDES Project. It is divided into two parts which provide an introduction to the use of computational tools for studying language learning. The first part is the CHAT manual, which describes the conventions and principles of CHAT transcription and recommends specific methods for data collection and digitization. The second part is the CLAN manual, which describes the uses of the editor, sonic CHAT, and the various analytic commands. The book will be useful for both novice and experienced users of the CHILDES tools, as well as instructors and students working with transcripts of child language. Volume II describes in detail all of the corpora included in the CHILDES database. The conversational interactions in the corpora come from monolingual children and their caregivers and siblings, as well as bilingual children, older school-aged children, adult second-language learners, children with various types of language disabilities, and aphasic recovering from language loss. The database includes transcripts in 26 different languages.