As transcribers, we are constantly trying to stay in the middle of two opposing forces: the tendency to over-attribute and the tendency to under-attribute the child’s knowledge of language. Over-attributing means giving the speaker too much credit for saying words that he or she might not have actually said, and under-attributing means missing some words that a speaker did say. This section is devoted to helping you avoid these two extremes.
Mark unintelligible speech as ###. This can stand for a whole line or it can be inserted for a word of phrase. Remember, don’t put punctuation after ### in your transcript (see Section 6.2). ### will not be counted in word types, tokens, or MLU counts, and it is basically disregarded for the purpose of most analyses, so only use it if you have really tried to understand the speaker and followed the procedure outlined in Section 7.7.
As implied by the emphasis on generally transcribing words rather than parts of words or sounds (see Section 5.3), do not transcribe only part of a word as ###. For example, you should never transcribe ###ing or ###ed.
When a child produces pre-linguistic babble, you should completely ignore it and transcribe nothing at all.
Sometimes you will encounter children who, for whatever reason (speech impediment, motor deficit, language delay) continue producing some speech that sounds like babble well into their second and even third year. It can be hard in these cases to determine whether you’re dealing with speech that is unintelligible (which should be transcribed as ###) or pre-linguistic babbling (which is completely ignored). As a general rule, to avoid under-attributing, if you hear some words mixed in with the babble, or think there very well could be words in there, err on the side of transcribing ### instead of nothing at all. Transcribe any real words you do hear along with ###.
Children, especially when they are very young, unfortunately will not always give you a clear rendition of every word they try to pronounce. For this reason, we have some criteria to determine whether a segment of child speech is a word or not. A child’s word must meet either of the criteria in 7.5.1 or 7.5.2 and meet the criteria in 7.5.3 to be considered a word.
For two-or-more syllable words, the child’s pronunciation must share at least one syllable with the adult pronunciation of the word. For example, if a child says “baba” meaning “bottle”, it could be transcribed as a real word, bottle (provided it also meets the criterion in 7.5.3, below) because it shares the first syllable, “bah” with the adult word “bottle”.
If the child’s pronunciation of a word with any number of syllables shares at least half its phonemes with the adult pronunciation of the word, then it could be transcribed as a real word (provided it also meets the criteria in 7.5.3, below). For example, the word “train” has four phonemes: /t/, /r/, /ei/, and /n/. If a child says “tay” (/tei/), then the child has produced two out of the four phonemes correctly, and you are free to move on to 7.5.3.
The child’s non-adultlike word must appear in at least one appropriate, obvious context in order to be considered a word. For example, if a child says “baba” while reaching for a bottle, then it’s safe to assume the child is saying “bottle”. Or, if the child says “baba”, the caregiver brings her a bottle, and then she appears satisfied as if she has gotten what she asked for, it is likely that she was saying “bottle”. On the other hand, if the child mutters “baba” to herself without doing something else to indicate what she means, she might just be babbling, or “baba” could even stand for something else (a mis-pronunciation of mama? The word ball? We just don’t know.).
If the context of a word is not immediately obvious, use the following procedure:
First, type the syllables you hear, followed by an asterisk and your best guess at the word, e.g. baba*bottle. Add any relevant contextual information that you do have in the context column.
- At the end of the transcript, go back through the transcript and find each asterisked form.
- If the word appears twice in two similar contexts, replace your asterisked guesses with the adult version of the word.
- If it only appears once and you are unsure of the meaning, delete it and replace it with ###.
Sometimes, especially when you are transcribing a child with a lot of hard-to-decipher speech, you may think you hear the child saying something but be afraid you are over-attributing. When this is the case, use the following procedure:
- First, ask another transcriber what he or she thinks the child is saying, without telling the transcriber your hypothesis. If the transcriber hears the same thing as you, you can be pretty confident transcribing what both of you hear.
- If the second transcriber doesn’t hear the same thing as you, tell them what you think the child is saying and see if they agree. If they agree with you strongly after hearing what you thought it was, and you still feel strongly about what you heard, then go ahead and transcribe what you both think the child is saying.
- If the two of you disagree about what the child is saying, or the second transcriber thinks you could be right but is still highly uncertain or skeptical, transcribe ### for the speech you are unsure about.
Sometimes a speaker will contract words together to the point where you can’t hear each word clearly enough to be sure what it is. For example, a person might say something that you would write out as ” ‘ja pick up your toys?” or ” ‘sokay.” In the first example, the speaker could be trying to say “did you pick up your toys”, “could you pick up your toys”, or “would you pick up your toys”. In the second example, the speaker could be saying “it’s ok” or “that’s ok”. It can be very difficult to tell in these cases exactly which words are being spoken. In cases such as these, you should transcribe the questionable word in parenthesis ( ). For example, transcribe (did) you pick up your toys? or (could) you pick up your toys? and (it)'s ok. or (that)'s ok.. Usually you will have enough information from context to identify the word in parentheses. For example, if the PCG has already asked her child to pick up his toys and is returning to the room to see if the child has done it yet, then it’s safe to assume that the PCG is trying to say “(did) you pick up your toys?” The fact that a word is in parentheses already indicates that the speaker contracted the word too much to be able to identify it clearly based on listening alone, so if you are still unsure about what it is, take your best guess based on the contextual information you have.
Sometimes children invent words that have nothing to do with the standard, adult version of the word. For example, a child might say “neenee” meaning “guitar” or “Amwes” meaning “Nemo”. If the idiosyncratic word has a clearly identifiable meaning that occurs in at least one obvious context, transcribe the word as it sounds, followed by the @ symbol, and indicate the word and its meaning on your transcript’s Info sheet. (See also: Section 6.1.1).
Some children, especially very young children, may produce an idiosyncratic word that he or she utters in many different situations and you can’t establish a clear, adult-like meaning for the word. For example, a child might say “bis” to mean “this”, “what’s this”, “look over there”, “I want this”, etc. Or a child may say “jehjeh” while pointing at the TV, his bottle, his mother, food, toys, the door, etc. If you find an idiosyncratic word that has a stable pronunciation but no precise, adult-like meaning, transcribe the word as it sounds, preceded by the & symbol. We use the & symbol for these words rather than the @ symbol because at the beginning of the study, idiosyncratic words without adult-like meanings were transcribed as ###, so we don’t want the fact that we are typing out these kinds of words now to inflate our new kids’ word token counts. (See also: Section 6.1.2).