CHILDES Clinical English POLER Corpus


William Gaillard
Epilepsy and Neurophysiology
Children's National Medical Center

website

Madison Berl
Neuropsychology
Children's National Medical Center

website

Nan Bernstein Ratner
Hearing and Speech Sciences
University of Maryland

Amy Strekas



Mara Steinberg Lowe
Communicative Sciences and Disorders
New York University

website

Participants: 25 epilepsy / 25 controls
Type of Study: clinical
Location: Washington, D.C.
Media type: audio
DOI: doi:10.21415/T51P4S

Browsable transcripts

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Link to media folder

Citation information

Researchers using data from this corpus should reference the following publications regarding the larger study:

In addition, researchers this cohort should reference one of the following two papers:

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

Plasticity of Language in Epilepsy Research (POLER) was a project conducted by William Gaillard, Madison Berl (both of Children’s National Medical Center, DC) and Nan Bernstein Ratner (UMD). The POLER children in this directory are a subset of a larger number of children followed by Gaillard et al. (2007), Berl et al. (2005), and Mbwana et al. (2009). They are 25 children with epilepsy (CWE) matched by age and gender to unaffected peers. Their ages varied from 7 to 11. The 25 CWE were further subdivided, as noted in individual files, by time since onset of seizure disorder. Recent onset children (CWE-R) were defined as those whose seizures had begun less than a year before entry into the study; those defined as chronic (CWE-C) had onsets more than 3 years previous to enrollment in the study. This distinction caused CWE-C and peers to be slightly older, as a group, than CWE-R and their matched peers. A chart is provided that illustrates how children were matched pair-wise.

Data are available for each child for a number of psychoeducational and standardized language assessments.

Transcripts are of the narrative elicitation task, which asked each child to generate a story to the book “Frog, where are you?” after children had been shown each set of plates in the story.

Transcripts were originally annotated for fluency for a project published by Steinberg et al. (2014), but were done in a format not compatible with the more recently developed fluency codes in CLAN.