CHILDES Clinical English Chiat-Ruth Corpus

Shula Chiat Language and Communication Sciences City University London shula.chiat.1@city.ac.uk website

Browsable transcripts

Download transcripts

Citation information

Chiat, S. & Hirson, A. (1987). From conceptual intention to utterance: a study of impaired language output in a child with developmental dysphasia. British Journal of Communication Disorders 22, 37-64.

Chiat, S. (2000). Understanding children with language problems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

In accordance with TalkBank rules, any use of data from this corpus must be accompanied by at least one of the above references.

Project Description

This file contains eight transcripts from a single case study of Ruth, who has SLI (see Chiat & Hirson, 1987 and Chiat, 2000). Five of the language samples are taken from a number of conversations with her when she was aged 10-11, and three are taken from a single conversation with her as an adult aged 23.

Ruth was referred for speech and language therapy when she was 3;5. The following results of standardised tests were available:

• Reynell Developmental Language Scales: Ruth’s verbal comprehension score was age-appropriate until age 5. After this, it fell to -2.5 and then -3 standard deviations. Her scores on the expressive language scale were initially off the scale, and at 5-6 years were around -3 standard deviations.
• Test for the Reception of Grammar: At 10 years, Ruth performed at the level of a 6 year old.

The childhood samples were collected in informal individual play sessions at Ruth’s school. Most of the speech was unsolicited, although the investigator sometimes set up hypothetical or fantasy scenarios with a view to eliciting more creative use of language including talk about non-present and hypothetical situations. The adult sample was collected in an informal conversation that took place at Ruth’s home.

All conversations were audiotaped and all Ruth’s utterances were transcribed immediately after the session, together with investigator utterances and contextual detail necessary to identify Ruth’s semantic intentions.