Exercise C: This exercise uses the Eve dataset in CHILDES and the CLAN software. The dataset from the Brown corpus and can be downloaded from http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/data/Eng-NA-MOR/.
In this exercise you will be tracking Eve’s MLUs at different ages and linking the MLUs to developmental stages
Write a 500-word abstract about the data that you are analyzing here. Write the abstract as if you were writing an abstract for a linguistics conference. You can see examples of conference abstracts here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B0a477xEnvzXVWEyNkNMVUtjdEk/view
(the one-page abstracts starts a couple of pages into the document). Your abstract should include the following:
i) An introduction that introduces your analysis and describes what kinds of results you expect. Questions you may want to address in the introduction include: What kind of data are you looking at? Based on what you know about the one-word stage, two-word stage and multiword stage as well as which MLUs correspond to which of these milestones (see lecture slides for lectures 2 and 5), when would you expect Eve to reach which MLU?
j) A method section that tells us about the data, in particular, about the participant, the materials, and the task. You can find the relevant information here: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/manuals/02english-na.pdf.
k) A results section in which you present the results. In particular, you should make a table that shows Eve’s age and MLU for all the 20 files in the dataset. You should use CLAN to calculate MLUs. Information on how to do this is in the lecture slides for lecture 5. To find out Eve’s age for any given file in the dataset, open the file by double-clicking on it. The age, given in number of years and number of months separated by a semi-colon, is among the information in the fifth line of each file. Make sure that your table clearly presents the data. Then you should link the MLUs that you calculated for the different ages to the five MLU stages according to Brown and to the one-word stage, two-word stage and multiword stage. That is, at which age does Eve enter which stage?
l) A discussion section in which you discuss the results. Questions you may want to address in the introduction include: What do the results show? What do the results mean with respect to Eve’s linguistic development? Is this what you expected? I.e. does Eve enter the different developmental stages at the expected age or earlier or later than you expected?