CHILDES English Garvey Corpus

CHILDES English Garvey Corpus


Catherine Garvey
Department of Psychology
University of Maine, Orono

website

Participants: 54
Type of Study: naturalistic
Location: USA
Media type: no longer available
DOI: doi:10.21415/T56W2N

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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 directory contains a set of children’s conversational data collected by Catherine Garvey and donated to the CHILDES in 1986. The original corpus consists of 48 files of transcripts of dialogues between two children with no experimenter or other children present. All of the children’s names have been replaced with pseudonyms. The children range in age from 2;10 to 5;7. In the original corpus, pairs of children belong to 16 triads of three children. Particular files are always dialogues between two members of each triad. Calling the children in a given triad A, B, and C, there are always three possible pairings: AB, AC, and BC. Data for triads 1, 3, 4, 6, 10, and 11 are not in the CHILDES database. Thus, the database contains only 30 files from 10 triads. There is a file for each of these three pairings for each of the 10 triads. Garvey Triads
TriadChildAgesFiles
1Sue4;4suedon, suetim
Don3;9suedon, dontim
Tim4;1dontim, suetim
2Amy3;6amywes, amyann
Wes4;1amywes, wesann
Ann4;0wesann, amyann
3Hal4;5halpat, halivy
Pat4;10halpat, pativy
Ivy4;9halivy, pativy
4Ari5;1arigay, ariken
Gay5;2arigay, kengay
Ken5;2ariken, kengay
5Pia4;9piaval, piaabe
Val4;7piaval, valabe
Abe4;9valabe, piaabe
6Glo5;0glojoy, globob
Joy4;9glojoy, joybob
Bob4;11globob, joybob
7Fay5;3fayjay, faymeg
Jay5;0fayjay, jaymeg
Meg5;0faymeg, jaymeg
8Gus4;0gusleo, guseve
Leo4;0gusleo, leoeve
Eve3;11guseve, leoeve
9Kay3;6kayben, kaydeb
Ben3;7kayben, bendeb
Deb3;7kaydeb, bendeb
10Ned5;2nedima, nedmae
Ima5;4nedima, imamae
Mae5;5nedmae, imamae
11Bev5;7bevflo, bevguy
Flo5;1bevflo, floguy
Guy5;2bevguy, floguy
12Ida5;1idabud, idazoe
Bud5;1idabud, budzoe
Zoe5;0idazoe, budzoe
13Peg3;1pegron, pegjan
Ron3;3pegron, ronjan
Jan3;1pegjan, ronjan
14Sam2;11samian, samava
Ian2;10samian, ianava
Ava3;2samava, ianava
15Max3;1maxnan, maxjim
Nan2;10maxnan, nanjim
Jim3;0maxjim, nanjim
16Roy3;2roykim, royada
Kim3;0roykim, kimada
Ada3;3royada, kimada
The narrative section indicates when an interruption took place; it was sometimes nec-essary for the observers to intervene, to bring in another bag of toys, to turn on the light switch and caution the children not to turn off the light, or to take one or both children to the bathroom. Speech during these interruptions was not recorded. Conventional orthogra-phy is used with a few exceptions such as “gonna,” “gotta,” and “wanna.” Some clearly distorted pronunciations are indicated, such as “beebe bottel” for “baby bottle.” When periods, commas, or question marks appear in the text, they indicate utterance final intonation, nonterminal intonation, and interrogatory illocutionary force, respectively. In many scripts however, these punctuation marks are missing, as there was an unfulfilled plan to add transcription for intonation. The transcripts are heavily coded for actions, gestures, proxemics, timing, and intonation. The timing marks are missing for triad #4. Time is indicated in minutes and seconds with a colon separating the minutes and the seconds. The file “0stats.cdc” gives a variety of statistics computed for these 48 files by Catherine Garvey. These include total time, total words, total utterances, rate of utterance, per-centage utterances in an exchange, percentage time in focused interaction, and number of episodes that are longer than nine exchanges. For each child in the pair, this file reports number of words, number of utterances, and words per utterance. A frequent code that occurs on the %com line is $CFA, which stands for “common focus of attention.” The symbol $/= followed by a number is used to indicate that some event or focus of attention continues for a certain number of lines.