Access to L2 Data: The Childes Archive

Abstract

It goes without saying that longitudinal second language (L2) data have contributed—and will continue to contribute—much to L2 theory construction, yet one of the more difficult problems involved with this and similarly large-scale corpora is their very manageability. In years past, a common solution to this problem involved creating card catalogs for what appeared to be crucial parts of the data; more recently, researchers have resorted to computational resources, generally electronic databases. Nonetheless, these solutions remained strictly local: Access to such analytical means was generally restricted to the researchers involved. This situation is beginning to change, however, because, as this report will show, more child as well as adult L2 data are finding their way into the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) archive, thereby permitting widespread access to these data.