README.md

In gracelawley/childes: A Collection of Child Language Samples from 14 Corpora in CHILDES (2018.1)

childes

This package contains datasets created from a collection of 14 English child language corpora in the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES). The transcripts are from the childes-db (version 2018.1) and are accessed with the childesr package.

The 14 Corpora

• Bloom70
• Braunwald
• Brown
• Clark
• Cornell
• Demetras-Trevor
• EllisWeismer
• Hall
• Kuczaj
• MacWhinney
• Sachs
• Suppes
• Warren
• Weist

More information about the individual corpora can be found via the CHILDES website.

Inclusion/Exclusion Criteria

This subset of corpora was chosen from the English North American collection of CHILDES based on the following criteria.

Corpora

• Part of the Eng-NA section of CHILDES
• Sufficient information about the details of the study and corpus is available

Participants

• 36-96 months old
• English as first and primary language
• No reported gross sensory impairments (e.g. hearing impairment), congenital defects, developmental disabilities, or atypical development
• No significant/regular exposure to another language (i.e. 75% or higher consistent exposure to a language other than English)

Language Sampling Procedure

• Naturalistic and unscripted elicitations (in either naturalistic or laboratory settingss)
• Intelligible speech
• One-on-one conversations (e.g. child-examiner conversations or parent-child conversations)
• Can be child-child conversations as long as both children meet the participant requirements
• No conversations amongst a group of children
• No reading from books, etc.
• No restricted vocabulary that is caused by the structure of the study or the experiment design
• e.g. no samples of free play sesssions for multiple participants that each involve the same set of experimenter-provided toys No structured speech
• e.g. speech from an interview that has been tailored for a specific experimental interest(s)

Datasets

This package currently contains three datasets:

• childes_utterances: utterances of children from the 14 corpora
• childes_tokens: tokenized utterances of children from the 14 corpora
• childes_types: counts of words types in childes_tokens across all 14 corpora

Installation

# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("gracelawley/childes")

CHILDES Usage Rules

CHILDES is a part of the TalkBank database and asks users to follow the data usage rules found here.

Except where otherwise indicated, the use of TalkBank data is governed by the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

Works Cited

CHILDES: MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk. Third Edition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Sanchez, A., Meylan, S., Braginsky, M., MacDonald, K. E., Yurovsky, D., & Frank, M. C. (2018, April 23). childes-db: a flexible and reproducible interface to the Child Language Data Exchange System. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/93mwx

gracelawley/childes documentation built on May 7, 2019, 6:07 a.m.