Exploring Narrow Phonetic Transcription Training and Protocol

This preliminary research is meant to open the door to the comparison of training methods for narrow phonetic transcription, particularly evaluating the merits of what we will call "training by experience" and "direct training. The fundamental goals are to expedite and formalize the process of training and to increase intra- and inter-coder reliability. There is very little information in the literature regarding the actual process of training narrow phonetic transcription--the vast majority of references to the data gathering method note its inherent challenges and the ways in which they might be overcome (transcription by consensus is a typical workaround). In addition, various protocols are used, many of which are not published in full. The use of "unidentifiable error" categories is also problematic, as demonstrated by Haley et al. (2001)