# COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD LANGUAGE TRANSCRIPT DATA

> **NIH NIH R01** · CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY · 1994 · $179,455

## Abstract

The CHILDES Project provides three crucial tools now being used by language
researchers around the world.  The first tool is the CHILDES database of
computerized transcripts from interactions between children and their
parent.  This database includes data from earlier funded projects studying
children from a variety of social groups, ages, languages, and medical
conditions.  These data are made available to all researchers.  The second
major tool is the CHAT transcription format which is used to encode the
current database and new data being entered into the system.  The third
major tool is the CLAN package of data analysis programs which can be used
to automatically search the entire database for lexical, syntactic, and
discourse patterns relevant to key questions in developmental theory.

For the next funding period, the specific aims of the CHILDES project
involve five major initiatives that seek to expand and refine the shapes of
these three tools.

1.  The database initiative.  In this area, the goal is to improve the
quality and quantity of the existing CHILDES database through additional
data entry, detailed documentation, computer-assisted checking, and
reformatting.

2.  The Johnny Appleseed initiative.  The goal of this initiative     is to
make all three CHILDES tools maximally available to language researchers
around the world.

3.  The user-friendliness initiative.  Here the goal is increase     the
user-friendliness of the CLAN programs for UNIX, PC-DOS,     and Macintosh
by bundling the programs into a single menu- driven application for all
three systems.

4.  The discourse initiative.  The goal here is to create a set   of CLAN
programs that will facilitate study of narrative and conversational
discourse patterns.

5.  The morphosyntactic initiative.  Here the goal is to expand   the e-
morph and LAG systems to provide automatic morphological analyses and
computer-assisted part-of-speech   tagging and synaptic parsing of
sentences.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 2199024
- **Project number:** 5R01HD023998-07
- **Recipient organization:** CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY
- **SAM.gov UEI:** U3NKNFLNQ613
- **Principal Investigator:** BRIAN MACWHINNEY
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 1994
- **Award amount:** $179,455
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 1988-02-01 → 1995-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/2199024

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 2199024, COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF CHILD LANGUAGE TRANSCRIPT DATA (5R01HD023998-07). Retrieved via MORVS 2026-10-25 from https://api.morvs.ai/grant/nih/2199024. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*