CHILDES English Fletcher Corpus

Paul Fletcher Speech and Hearing Sciences University College Cork p.fletcher@ucc.ie website

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Citation information

Publications using these data should cite:

Fletcher, P., & Garman, M. (1988). Normal language development and language impairment: Syntax and beyond. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 2, 97–114.

Johnson, M. (1986). A computer-based approach to the analysis of child language data. University of Reading.

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

Additional relevant references include:

Crystal, D., Fletcher, P., & Garman, M. (1989). The grammatical analysis of language disability. (2nd ed.). London: Cole and Whurr.

Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1986). From meta-processes to conscious access: Evidence from children’s metalinguistic and repair data. Cognition, 23, 95–147

Project Description

This subdirectory contains the Reading corpus of transcripts from 72 British children ages 3, 5, and 7. The participants in the project were Paul Fletcher, Michael Garman, Michael Johnson, Christina Schelleter, and Louisette Stodel. The project was entitled “The standardization of an expressive language assessment procedure”. The aims of this project were as follows:

1. To establish a computer database of the expressive language of British children between 3;0 and 7;0.
2. To identify grammatical and lexical features of this database that were developmentally significant.
3. To apply this information in the identification, assessment, and remediation of language-impaired children. This goal, which arises out of earlier work on LARSP (Crystal, Fletcher, & Garman, 1989), affects all aspects of the database including choice of interlocutor, data collection methods, and transcription decisions.

Elicitation

All data were collected in an interview situation between a female adult and the child. This was a deliberate attempt to mimic the typical initial encounter between a speech therapist and a child who is being assessed. All interviews took place in a quiet area of the nursery or school the child was attending, and lasted for approximately 45 minutes. The elicitation protocol for these sessions included these techniques:

1. Stick-on game (SG). Conversation takes place around a game (supplied by UNISET), consisting of a picture of either a house interior or a farmyard, and an appropriate set of stickers to be located at various points on these pictures.
2. Free/guided conversation (FC). There are no props for this part of the interview. The experimenter asks questions about the child’s school and home experiences, and about significant past and future events in the child’s life (Christmas, holidays, birthdays, Bonfire Night, and so forth). The aim is to encourage the child to talk, in as spontaneous a way as is possible within the constraints of the situation).
3. Balloon story (BS). The balloon story is a brief picture story, devised by Annette Karmiloff-Smith, to examine children’s pronominal reference in discourse (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986).

Transcription and Segmentation

Conventions for transcription were the product of much discussion in the project team; their formal implementation was the work of M. Johnson.

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by Medical Research Council grant no. 68306114N and NATO Collaborative Research grant no. RG84/0135.