The goal of this project is the development of computational tools to facilitate the linguistic analysis of transcript data in the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) database. The three areas being targeted are lexicon, morphosyntax, and phonology. The goal of the lexical initiative is the construction of a keyed relational database that will serve as a dynamic lexical frequency dictionary for each of the major languages in the database. This database will be available to researchers in electronic form. A canonical form of the dictionary will also be published in book format. A series of demonstration studies based on the use of this database will be completed to illustrate to researchers how a lexical database can serve as the foundation for modern crosslinguistic studies of lexical development. The goal of the morphosyntactic initiative is the construction of tools to permit automatic tagging and parsing of the corpora in the CHILDES database. Using these parsed and tagged structures, additional programs will be designed to compute morpheme usage and omission, phrasal structure, clause structures, and sentence structure. These measures can be used to compare across languages, age levels, and clinical subtypes. The goal of the phonological initiative is the construction of a set of tools for developing and analyzing phonological databases. Although these data will initially be represented in standard CHILDES file format, they will also be converted into a relational database that will facilitate a variety of analyses of phonological processes. The completion of this work will markedly improve the usability of the CHILDES database for more advanced forms of linguistic analysis.
