Brian MacWhinney (Carnegie Mellon University & SDU): TalkBank - Reintegrating the Disciplines

Human communication is a single, complex, unified process. However, specific aspects of this process are studied in detail by 20 largely separate academic traditions, ranging from information theory and phonetics to conversation analysis and psycholinguistics. Although this fractionated approach has led to many advances, it has failed to illuminate links between the disciplines. To achieve this, the TalkBank Project has constructed the world’s largest available database of spoken language interactions, all contributed by individual scientific work groups from across the globe. Much of this database is now available in a form that links transcripts directly to audio and video media for playback on the desktop or over the web. TalkBank communities are now particularly active in the areas of child language development, aphasia, conversation analysis, legal discourse, gesture-language linkages, classroom discourse, and phonological analysis. For all of these groups, TalkBank is providing increasingly powerful interoperable tools for analyzing phonetics (Praat, Phon), gesture (ELAN), and morphosyntax (GRASP), and for supporting collaborative commentary on target corpora across the web. Using these tools, researchers will eventually be able to study a set of richly annotated multimedia transcriptions from a wide variety of analytic perspectives.