The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) is a

corpus Corpus is Latin for "body". It may refer to: Linguistics * Text corpus, in linguistics, a large and structured set of texts * Speech corpus, in linguistics, a large set of speech audio files * Corpus linguistics, a branch of linguistics Music * ...

established in 1984 by Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow to serve as a central repository for data of first

language acquisition Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960s, and it now has contents (transcripts, audio, and video) in 26 languages from 130 different corpora, all of which are publicly available worldwide. Recently, CHILDES has been made into a component of the larger corpus TalkBank, which also includes language data from aphasics,

second language acquisition Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning — otherwise referred to as L2 (language 2) acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific dis ...

conversation analysis Conversation analysis (CA) is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life. CA originated as a sociological method, but has since spread to other fields. CA began wit ...

, and classroom language learning. CHILDES is mainly used for analyzing the language of young children and directed to the child speech of adults. 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. CHILDES is currently directed and maintained by Brian MacWhinney at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Database Format

There are a variety of languages and ages represented in the CHILDES transcripts. The majority of the transcripts are from spontaneous interactions and conversations. The transcriptions are coded in the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts) transcription format, which provides a standardized format for producing conversational transcripts. This system can be used to transcribe conversations with any type of language learner: children, second-language learners, and recovering aphasics. In addition to discourse level transcription, the CHAT system also has options for

phonological Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

and morphological analysis. The CLAN program was developed by Leonid Spektor and aids in transcription and analysis of the child language data.

Use in Research

To date, over 4500 published studies cite CHILDES. CHILDES reports this number in their manuals and Google Scholar contains 5451 citations as of July 2017.

References

External links

CHILDES Homepage
{{DEFAULTSORT:Childes Language acquisition Corpora Applied linguistics Linguistic research acquisition-stub