CHILDES

The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a corpus established in 1984[1] by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first language acquisition.[2][1] Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and as of 2015 has contents (transcripts, audio, and video) in 26 languages from 230 different corpora, all of which are publicly available worldwide.[3] Recently, CHILDES has been made into a component of the larger corpus TalkBank, which also includes language data from aphasics, second language acquisition, conversation analysis, and classroom language learning. CHILDES is mainly used for analyzing the language of young children and speech of adults directed to them.[4]

During the early 1990s, as computational resources capable of easily manipulating the data volumes found in CHILDES became commonly available, there was a significant increase in the number of studies of child language acquisition that made use of it.[1] CHILDES is currently directed and maintained by Brian MacWhinney at Carnegie Mellon University.

  1. ^ a b c Sanchez, Alesssandro; Meylan, Stephan C; Braginsky, Mika; MacDonald, Kyle E; Yurovsky, Daniel; Frank, Michael C (2019). "childes-db: A Flexible and reproducible interface to the child language data exchange system". Behavior Research Methods. 51 (4): 1928–1941. doi:10.3758/s13428-018-1176-7. hdl:1721.1/131922. PMID 30623390. S2CID 256203840. Archived from the original on February 20, 2020. Retrieved January 19, 2023.
  2. ^ "Introduction to the Database" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-09-22. Retrieved 2015-07-08.
  3. ^ MacWhinney, Brian. "CHILDES: Child Language Data Exchange System". Language Technologies Institute. Archived from the original on September 6, 2015. Retrieved January 19, 2023.
  4. ^ Biber, Douglas (1998). Corpus linguistics: Investigating language structure and use. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521499576.