ABSTRACT

In a series of articles in recent issues of the Journal of Child Language (Edwards 1992a, MacWhinney and Snow 1992, Edwards 1993a) Jane Edwards on the one hand, and Brian MacWhinney and Catherine Snow, on the other, swap views about the extent to which the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) transcripts, encoded in Codes for Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT) format, conform to four principles for archive-based language research enumerated by Edwards (1992a) (see also Edwards, Chapter 1). These principles are as set out in (1):

Maximum readability and minimum bias

Consistent encoding for exhaustive retrieval

Systematic contrastiveness

Data comparability