Young Learners Corpus
Headers used (for searching purposes)
It is important to understand how the headers work in the CHILDES system, as they contain the labels which will enable the computer to recognise files and therefore to search the corpora for individual files or batches of files.
Each file has to have a number of descriptive "headers", as described below, and always introduced by the @ symbol. The headers used in this corpus are the following:
@Languages: fra,eng
@Participants: TEA Teacher, CHI Child, CHIS Children
Lesson transcripts have 6 participants (speaker tiers). Each speaker tier is coded for language. The speaker code is TEAE if the utterance is in English and TEAF if the utterance is in French. The codes for the children’s lines follow the same rules: CHIE: one child speaks English, CHIF: one child speaks French, CHISE: several children speak English, CHISF: several children speak French.
@ID: fra|BFP|TEAF||female|Y7|L1|Teacher||
This header includes the two IDs for the teacher, one for when they’re speaking English, one when they’re speaking French along with the four IDs for the children when they are speaking French and English as a group (CHISE/CHISF) or individually (CHIE/CHIF).
BFP stands for beginners’ French project. Y7 stands for the year group the class is taken from. L1 stands for the lesson which has been recorded, L1 is lesson 1.
@Date: 01-FEB -2010
This is the date when the data was recorded.
@Media:
Filename of the audio file.
@Transcriber: AD
Initials of the transcriber.