This section is intended to explain the way we transcribe things at the word level. The philosophy behind our transcription system is summed up in Rule 5.1. We want to include all of the words that the child and caregiver say, but phonological development is beyond the scope of our transcribing system. People interested in things like phonetic pronunciation will do their own analyses with acoustic software and careful phonetic transcriptions, so we don’t need to worry about that at the first level of transcription.
Transcribe each word that is spoken (i.e. do not correct a speaker’s utterance, see Rule 5.7), but do not transcribe the exact phonetics of a word (i.e. “got ‘em” would be transcribed got them).
Transcribe each word that the child and caregiver say, including indefinite communicative sounds like “hmm” and “uh”. (Use the list of conventional spellings to figure out how to spell indefinite communicative sounds.)
Transcribe whole words only, not parts of words. Do not type 'cause for because or 'till for until, even if that’s what the speaker says. If you transcribe these nonstandard forms, our computer programs might not recognize them and will count them as separate word types from their fully expanded counter-parts.
Use only conventional (standardized) contractions when transcribing (such as “aren’t”, “isn’t”, “you’re”, “they’re”, “I’m”, etc.). If it can be typed with a standard apostrophe, you can use that contraction. Do keep “ain’t” as well as some not-so-standardized contractions such as “what’d”, “Mommy’ll”, “what’ll”, etc.
Avoid the following:
| hafta | (transcribe have to instead) |
| wanna | (transcribe want to instead) |
| gonna, gon’ | (transcribe going to instead) |
| gimme | (transcribe give me instead) |
| lemme | (transcribe let me instead) |
| pick’em up | (transcribe pick them up instead) |
| get’im | (transcribe get him instead) |
| swimmin’ | (transcribe swimming instead) |
| ...etc. |
This rule is ONLY for children age 30 months and younger. Since all of the younger typically-developing transcripts have been transcribed already, this rule will only be for P3 transcripts at this point. There is one case when it is acceptable to transcribe some of the apostrophe-less contractions in Section 5.4, and that is when a child has not learned the non-contracted forms of the words. The first five words in the example in 5.4 are candidates for being fused forms. A child might say “gimme” or “lemme” without knowing that they are composed of the words “give me” or “let me”. These are called fused forms because they are fused together as a single word in the child’s lexicon. Once the child has produced the words “let” and “give” by themselves, however, we have reason to believe that the child understands on some level that these words are not fused forms, but rather that they are composed of separate words. To decide whether something is a fused form, use the procedure outlined in 5.5.1 to 5.5.3.
If you hear a child say “lookit”, “gonna”, “wanna”, “lemme”, “gimme”, etc. and you haven’t heard her say “look”, “going”, “want”, “let”, “give”, etc., type out the fused form and mark it with an asterisk (gonna*). The asterisk will be removed before you submit the transcript, but it will help you find these forms later. Sections 5.5.2 and 5.5.3 explain when to remove the asterisk.
Keep your ears open for hearing the potentially fused word in a separate environment. When you do hear the fused word on its own, go back to the asterisked word(s) and change them to their non-fused forms. That is, change lookit* to look at, gimme* to give me, etc. Do NOT allow the asterisked form to make it into the final transcript.
If you do not hear a fused-form word by itself (e.g. you never hear “look” in isolation), then before you turn in your transcript, check previous transcripts to see if they contain the relevant words in isolation. If no previous transcripts have any un-fused forms of the potentially fused words, then go ahead and remove the asterisks (*) from your fused form words and turn in the transcript. Only turn in a transcript with fused words if you are sure that the non-fused forms of the words in question never appear anywhere in any transcript of the child’s speech.
Whenever you do transcribe a fused form, indicate the expanded version of the fused form in brackets, with a colon right after the opening bracket, like this gimme [: give me] so that the syntax-coding software can recognize it.
When the mother says part of a word, give her credit for the entire word instead of transcribing only the fragment she says. For example, if she says “san – sandwich,” or “do you want a tuna san –” type sandwich -- sandwich or do you want a tuna sandwich --. If a person is stuttering and produces less than a whole syllable of a word or less than the majority of the phonemes in a one-syllable word (see Rule 7.5), ignore the stuttering completely.
Do not correct any speech. You must transcribe what the speaker says, even if you might not say it that way. If a parent says, “they is here,” type they is here and not they are here. Likewise, if a child says, “where my puppy?” type where my puppy? and not where's my puppy?. This is extremely important, as we are interested not only in the development of children’s use of auxiliary verbs and other morphemic endings that are sometimes omitted, but also dialect differences among our children and caregivers. If you correct any speech in your transcripts, then we are learning about your syntax, not the speaker’s.
Transcribe the child’s word like the adult word. Do not try to spell out the child’s immature pronunciation of words. For example, if the child pronounces “bottle” as “baba”, type out the word bottle instead of writing baba.
If the speaker is sounding out a word, transcribe the syllables as the speaker says them, placing an & symbol before each syllable. The & symbol will ensure that the syllable is not counted as a full word (see Section 6.1.2 for more on the & symbol).
| p_utt | c_utt |
|---|---|
| can you say November? | |
| you say it. | |
| &no. | |
| &no. | |
| &vem. | |
| &vem. | |
| &ber. | |
| &ber. |
When transcribing letter sounds, use the standard spelling for each sound from our list of standard spellings, and put the & symbol before each spelled sound. For example, if a speaker says, “b says buh,” transcribe b@l says &buh. That way, the sound “buh” doesn’t get counted as its own word. (See Section 6.1.2 for more on the & symbol and Section 6.4 for more on the @l symbol).
If a child has an unusual use of “a”, transcribe a.
| c_utts |
|---|
| a Mommy eats it. |
| a do it. |
| a Mommy shoes. |