CHILDES

CHILDES, short for Child Language Data Exchange System, is a long-standing cross-linguistic database and software framework designed to support research on child language development. It collects, stores, and distributes transcripts of child–caregiver interactions, often accompanied by audio or video recordings, from a variety of languages and cultural contexts. Researchers use CHILDES data to study phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse, as well as to develop and validate transcription and annotation methodologies.

The data are encoded in the CHAT format (Conversational Transcript), with conventions for segmentation, coding of utterances, glosses, and translations. The accompanying CLAN software suite provides tools for transcription management, search, and analysis, including routines to compute measures such as mean length of utterance (MLU), lexical diversity, and concordance statistics. The corpus is integrated with the TalkBank framework, which also hosts resources for adult conversation, language disorders, and bilingual data, enabling cross-project analyses.

History and use: Since the 1980s, the CHILDES project has grown through international collaboration among linguists, psychologists, and speech-language pathologists. It aims to standardize data collection and annotation to facilitate replication and cross-linguistic comparisons. Access is generally open to researchers and educators, subject to data usage guidelines and citation requirements. The project remains a central resource in language development research and in training students and clinicians.