Garvey, C. (1979). An approach to the study of children’s role play. The Quarterly News-letter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 12.
Garvey, C., & Hogan, R. (1973). Social speech and social interaction: Egocentrism revis-ited. Child Development, 44, 562–568.
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
Triad
Child
Ages
Files
1
Sue
4;4
suedon, suetim
Don
3;9
suedon, dontim
Tim
4;1
dontim, suetim
2
Amy
3;6
amywes, amyann
Wes
4;1
amywes, wesann
Ann
4;0
wesann, amyann
3
Hal
4;5
halpat, halivy
Pat
4;10
halpat, pativy
Ivy
4;9
halivy, pativy
4
Ari
5;1
arigay, ariken
Gay
5;2
arigay, kengay
Ken
5;2
ariken, kengay
5
Pia
4;9
piaval, piaabe
Val
4;7
piaval, valabe
Abe
4;9
valabe, piaabe
6
Glo
5;0
glojoy, globob
Joy
4;9
glojoy, joybob
Bob
4;11
globob, joybob
7
Fay
5;3
fayjay, faymeg
Jay
5;0
fayjay, jaymeg
Meg
5;0
faymeg, jaymeg
8
Gus
4;0
gusleo, guseve
Leo
4;0
gusleo, leoeve
Eve
3;11
guseve, leoeve
9
Kay
3;6
kayben, kaydeb
Ben
3;7
kayben, bendeb
Deb
3;7
kaydeb, bendeb
10
Ned
5;2
nedima, nedmae
Ima
5;4
nedima, imamae
Mae
5;5
nedmae, imamae
11
Bev
5;7
bevflo, bevguy
Flo
5;1
bevflo, floguy
Guy
5;2
bevguy, floguy
12
Ida
5;1
idabud, idazoe
Bud
5;1
idabud, budzoe
Zoe
5;0
idazoe, budzoe
13
Peg
3;1
pegron, pegjan
Ron
3;3
pegron, ronjan
Jan
3;1
pegjan, ronjan
14
Sam
2;11
samian, samava
Ian
2;10
samian, ianava
Ava
3;2
samava, ianava
15
Max
3;1
maxnan, maxjim
Nan
2;10
maxnan, nanjim
Jim
3;0
maxjim, nanjim
16
Roy
3;2
roykim, royada
Kim
3;0
roykim, kimada
Ada
3;3
royada, 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.