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The wheat and the chaff: or four confusions regarding CHILDES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Brian Macwhinney  and
Catherine Snow
Brian Macwhinney*
Affiliation:
Carnegie Mellon University
Catherine Snow
Affiliation:
Harvard University
*
Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. e-mail: brian@andrew.cmu.edu.
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Abstract

Edwards (1992) presents a set of examples from the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) as prototypes of bad transcription practice. Her discussion is based upon four basic confusions. First, Edwards confuses old and discarded versions of CHAT with current CHAT. Second, she confuses the relation between CHAT standards with the implementation of these standards during the process of reformatting older corpora. Third, she confuses transcription for automatic analysis with transcription for documentation. Fourth, she confuses the CHAT guidelines with the larger CHILDES system. We argue that these confusions have misled Edwards into developing an overly rigid set of principles for data analysis which, if followed literally, could choke off progress in the analysis of spontaneous language samples.

Type
Notes and Discussion
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 459 - 471
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

REFERENCES

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