Transcription and coding for child language research: The parts are more than the whole.

People have been writing down what infants say at least since Charles Darwin’s diary of his son’s language development in the 19th century. Two parallel lines of development since then have influenced how we record the data of children’s language for understanding how language is acquired. One of these developments has been conceptual: The different questions researchers ask influence the sorts of data they collect. At the same time, electronic innovations continue to provide increasingly more sophisticated equipment to supplement (but not replace) paper and pencils. This chapter first presents a discussion of conceptual and procedural developments that influence observational research in child language. The main purpose of the chapter is to then describe the rationale, procedures, and equipment for computer-assisted transcription and coding, developed in Lois Bloom’s research laboratory since 1981, for studying how young children acquire language in relation to developments in their cognition and emotional expression