TalkBank

TalkBank is a collaborative data repository and platform for the collection, storage, and sharing of large-scale transcripts and media from human communication. It supports research across language development, psycholinguistics, and communication disorders by providing standardized data and tools to enable cross-study comparison and reproducible analysis. The project aims to foster data sharing, methodological transparency, and interdisciplinary research.

TalkBank hosts several major corpora, including CHILDES, which focuses on child language, and AphasiaBank, which gathers speech and language samples from adults with aphasia. Additional TalkBank collections cover areas such as bilingual development, autism, discourse in everyday interaction, and other communicative contexts. Data are typically stored as transcripts in the CHAT format, often linked to audio or video recordings, and accompanied by metadata and annotations. The platform supports the CLAN family of analysis tools for transcript-based linguistic analysis and for aligning transcripts with audio.

Access to TalkBank data is provided to registered researchers under corpus-specific terms that reflect consent, privacy, and licensing considerations. Some datasets are openly accessible, while others require registration and approval. Documentation and user support accompany the data, with guidance on transcription conventions, annotation schemes, and analysis workflows. The project emphasizes interoperability and reproducibility by maintaining standardized formats and offering compatible analysis tools.

TalkBank originated as an expansion of the earlier CHILDES project to create a global, multi-disciplinary resource for studying human communication. It has become a widely used reference in linguistics, psychology, speech-language pathology, and related fields, supporting cross-cultural and cross-population research and enabling collaborative investigations into language and communication processes.