The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), created by Brain MacWhinney and Catherine Snow in 1984, is one of the earliest Open Science and data sharing initiatives in child language development research, and probably in developmental psychology and the behavioral sciences more generally. It is the cornerstone of TalkBank--a repository of…

Linguists are sometimes confronted with choices concerning language names. For example, one and the same language may be referred to as Persian or Farsi. This short paper discusses some principles that one might use for making decisions when there are variant forms in use, or when one feels that none of the existing names is appropriate. The…

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in…

Corpora of child language are essential for research in child language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Linguistic annotation of the corpora provides researchers with better means for exploring the development of grammatical constructions and their usage. We describe a project whose goal is to annotate the English section of the CHILDES database…

Information about the ERIC Clearinghouse on Languages and Linguistics (CLL), part of the federal ERIC education network and database that is housed at the Center for Applied Linguistics, is offered. Ways to find ERIC/CLL documents and access the ERIC database are outlined. (LB)

Describes the Stanford Computer Archive of Language Materials (CALM), a computerized archive of language materials available for use by researchers. (DD)

Discussion of the use of computers in Slavonic studies in the Ukraine focuses on linguistics. Topics addressed include the Machine Fund of Russian, a Russian language database; the Machine Fund of Non-Russian Languages that includes each republic of the former Soviet Union; natural language processing; and comparing languages. (18 references) (LRW)

Describes a project whose purpose is to set up a computerized database of bilingual texts to be used by researchers in the field of language interaction (i.e., codeswitching, borrowing, and other outcomes of contact between varieties). Current work includes adaptation of the CHILDES system to take account of the different needs of researchers in…

The ISU/ChiLDES bibliographic database, a nonprofit computerized database dedicated to language acquisition, currently consists of nearly 1,900 annotated bibliographic references to journal articles dating back to 1972. (CB)

Examines the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), its organizational form, and its three major tools: (1) the CHILDES database of transcripts, (2) the CHAT system for transcribing and coding data, and (3) the CLAN programs for analyzing CHAT files. (GLR)

Describes the International Corpus of English Corpus Utility Program (ICECUP), a computer-based text retrieval program designed to search a tagged corpus for words, word elements, and their grammatical roles. Explains the search, display options, concordance, and subcorpus selection features of the ICECUP program. (MDM)

Notes that the employment of databases to the study of the history of a language is a method that allows for substantial improvement in investigative quality. Illustrates this with the example of the application of this method to two studies of the history of Spanish developed in the Language and Information Seminary of the Independent University…

Describes the Human Communication Research Centre Dialogue Database. The database consists of over 700 transcribed and coded dialogues from pairs of speakers aged from 7-14. The speakers are recorded over 2 years while tackling cooperative problem-solving tasks, and the same pairs of speakers are recorded over 2 years tackling 10 different…

Describes the formation of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), a system formed to foster the sharing of computerized data on language acquisition. Details the governance of the system, the nature of the database, the shape of the coding conventions, and the types of computer programs being developed. (SED)

This paper illustrates the use of corpus-based analytical techniques to address a range of issues in applied linguistics. This approach provides large databases of naturally occurring discourse, enabling empirical analyses of the actual patterns of use in a language and, when coupled with automatic computational tools, enables analyses of a scope…