We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
There are many features which we may want to transcribe and code in free data, but what is the best system of transcription that will allow us to do so? This chapter will discuss a widely used system called CHAT.
In the previous chapter I addressed the problem of how to analyse free speech. I proposed that it is important to analyse naturalistic speech data from the point of view of complexity, accuracy and fluency. That is, each utterance should be coded for its lexical, morphological, morphosyntactic and syntactic complexity and accuracy, each disfluency and hesitation should be marked, and overall lexical diversity should be assessed.
You can imagine how quickly the wrong coding system can make an entirely unreadable mess of your data. However, do not do what I did when I wrote my Ph.D., which was to print out all of my data (comprising some 175,000 words) multiple times, and to go through them with different coloured text markers to code features such as singular and plural noun phrases, main clauses, subordinate clauses, different tenses, different genders of noun phrases, different cases, and so on, subsequently counting them all by hand. Instead, I recommend that you use the system of coding and transcriptions which has been developed by Brian MacWhinney in the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) project (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu; see also MacWhinney, 2000).
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
