Progression Corpus
Headers used
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:
@Participants: L01 Subject, JVH Investigator
L01 is the code for the learner: 01 is the student number and L is the code
for task. JVH is the code for the researcher.
Identification – each file has two IDs, as follows:
@ID: fr|flloc|L01||male|School -1-8l2|subject|
language; corpus; participant code; gender; school year, task,group; role
fr stands for French, the language of the corpus; flloc is the corpus, L01 is the task followed by the number allocated to the student, this student is male, The school is number 1 and then the school year and the group, followed by the role of the participant.
@ID: fr|flloc|RFM|||||Investigator||
language; corpus; code for Investigator; role
@Date: 17-Nov-1995
The date of the exercise.
@Coder: LON converter RFM
3-letter code for initial transcriber, followed
by 3-letter code for converter; i.e. person who re-formatted the data into CHAT
All these headers can be used to search the corpus; in other words, this corpus can be searched to retrieve e.g. all learners performing the Loch Ness Narration task, who are in year 8, and who are female.