Tools for the Linguistic Analysis of the CHILDES Database

该项目的目标是开发计算工具，以便对儿童语言数据交换系统（CHILDES）数据库中的文本数据进行语言分析。三个目标领域是词汇、词法和音系。词法计划的目标是构建一个键控关系数据库，该数据库将作为数据库中每种主要语言的动态词法频率字典。这个数据库将以电子形式提供给研究人员。该词典的标准版本也将以书籍的形式出版。在此基础上，本文将完成一系列的实证研究，向研究人员说明词汇数据库如何成为现代跨语言词汇发展研究的基础。形态句法计划的目标是构建工具，以允许对CHILDES数据库中的语料库进行自动标记和解析。使用这些解析和标记的结构，将设计额外的程序来计算语素的使用和省略、短语结构、子句结构和句子结构。这些指标可用于跨语言、年龄水平和临床亚型的比较。音韵学倡议的目标是建立一套开发和分析音韵学数据库的工具。虽然这些数据最初将以标准CHILDES文件格式表示，但它们也将被转换成一个关系数据库，这将有助于对语音过程进行各种分析。这项工作的完成将显著提高CHILDES数据库对更高级形式的语言分析的可用性。

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.