LINGUIST List 3.111

Tue 04 Feb 1992

Sum: Speech errors

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1. , Lang and Law
2. Ron Smyth, Speech errors: summary

I write to thank all of you who responded to my call for papers &
discussants for the Law and Society Ass'n Annual Meeting. I'll get
back to you individually shortly. I'll also post the program for the
sessions publicly shortly. Finally, one respondent reported that she
had difficulty reaching me by e-mail because I left the "bitnet"
part of the address off. I am sorry if that inconvenienced others.
Full address: dumasbutkvx.bitnet

This is a summary of responses to my request for information regarding
public-access data bases of speech errors. Thanks to Ann Laubstein,
Pier Marco Bertinetto, Vicki Fromkin, Kay Bock, Joe Stemberger, Penni
Sibun, Liz Shriberg, Erwin Klock, Nancy Dray, Karen Ward,
Aaron Halpern, and Malcolm Ross for responses. Several very generously
offered access to their own corpora and/or made suggestions for
Janet Shawyer's proposal concerning the representation of negation and tense.

There appears to be no public data base available yet, but the following
bits of information are encouraging:

- Fromkin notes that she has submitted grant proposals
to set up such a database using commerical software. It would contain her
15,000 errors, plus thousands more from Merrill Garrett and Stefanie
Shattuck-Hufnagle.
- Stemberger would like to put his 7,500 errors on the ChiLDES data
base.
- Stemberger also informs me that Susana del Viso and colleagues have
put a Spanish corpus in computer-readable format.
[Can anyone give me her address?]
- Bertinetto offered access to a corpus of 3000 Italian errors collected by
a student of his.

Aaron Halpern made the interesting suggestion that, pending the appearance
of a properly organized public data base, members of LINGUIST might consider
 establishing a file consisting of contributed corpora. He has
volunteered to share the work involved in setting it up and sending
it out to interested parties. I therefore propose some discussion
on the list. First, is anyone will and able to contribute such
a file? Secondly, what information must be provided
with each contribution (e.g., how the errors were collected, how they
are organized)? Third, would it be feasible to set this up as an ftp site,
or would it be better to just post a list of people who are willing to share
disks? I am curious to know how many lists of errors are out there, whether
there are many languages represented, and whether people are collecting
errors from children.
Ron Smyth
smythlake.scar.utoronto.ca