Transcription Guide Intro

Overview

As a transcriber, you will be responsible for the first stage in a long process of analyzing spontaneous speech data. You will take videos of spontaneous child-primary caregiver (PCG) interactions and convert them into a format that can be queried and coded by computer programs and people. Researchers have used our transcripts to investigate the development of syntax, gesture, and many other aspects of language and communication, and they rely on you to record the speech of children and caregivers as objectively and accurately as possible.

Objectives

The rules in this document are designed to accomplish three things:

1. to ensure that we transcribe the speech as objectively as we can, meaning our own biases play as little a role in determining the way we record speech as possible.
2. to ensure that our transcriptions are reliable, meaning that different transcribers using these rules should be able to hear the same tape and transcribe it in the same way.
3. to put our data into a format that can be used by a variety of different parties with different research interests. The decisions you will make as a transcriber about what words the child and caregiver are saying, how they are spelled, and where their utterance boundaries fall will be important to a lot of people! The rules and guidelines below will help you, the transcriber, to create the best, most reliable transcripts possible.