CHILDES English Bohannon Corpus
|
John Neil Bohannon III
Department of Psychology
Butler University
nbohanno@butler.edu
|
Participants: | 2 |
Type of Study: | naturalistic |
Location: | USA |
Media type: | no longer available |
DOI: | doi:10.21415/T5DS3V |
Browsable transcripts
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Citation information
Bohannon, J. N., & Marquis, A. L. (1977). Children’s control of adult speech.
Child Development, 1002–1008.
Stine, E. L., & Bohannon III, J. N. (1983). Imitations, interactions, and
language acquisition. Journal of Child Language, 10(3), 589–603.
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
These transcripts show the interaction of different adults with one
of two children, Nat and Baxter. There were 17 adults interacting with
Nat and 10 interacting with Baxter. The adults include 15
undergraduates, 5 graduates and the participant’s mother. The data were
collected in 1976.
Participants
Twelve undergraduates and five graduate students
participated in the experiment. Nat was 2;8 (MLU = 3.59 morphemes) when
he interacted with the undergraduates. He was 3;0 (MLU = 3.73 morphemes)
when he interacted with the graduate students. Nat was the son of a
college professor and a college graduate and probably verbally
precocious. No information is available about Baxter.
Procedure
Students were given minimal instructions concerning
the experiment. They were simply told to converse with the child and to
try to draw him into conversation. The undergraduate students were sent
to Nat’s home in six teams of two students and one team of three
students. The students visiting Baxter’s home went singly. During each
interaction, the noninteracting team members took contextual notes while
the other team member interacted. The mother was present during all
interactions, as was an experimental assistant who ran the tape
recorder. All interactions were recorded on Realistic Super Tape by
means of a Realistic CTR-29 cassette deck. During the interaction
several play materials (i.e. blocks, stuffed animals, and books around
the house) were made available for assisting conversations. The average
interaction lasted about 15 minutes, with one group of undergraduate
students going a full hour. Nat’s mother and the authors checked the
transcriptions against the tapes for accuracy.