We are pleased to announce that TalkBank CLARIN Knowledge Centre at Carnegie Mellon University (Pennsylvania, USA) has been successfully re-assessed as a CLARIN B-centre and has received a renewed B-centre certificate.
TalkBank is a project coordinated by Professor Brian MacWhinney, and is hosted at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). TalkBank’s goal is to promote and enable research on human communication, with a specific focus on the cognitive, neurological, developmental, and social underpinnings of language processing. To this end, TalkBank provides (spoken) language resources for researchers and clinicians interested in communication. Hundreds of researchers have contributed to the data in TalkBank, and its resources span over 34 languages. Currently, TalkBank provides repositories in 14 research areas. Supported by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, these include:
- AphasiaBank for the study of language in aphasia in six languages,
- CHILDES for the study of child language development in 42 languages from infancy to age 6,
- FluencyBank for the study of language fluency and disfluency in stuttering, aphasia, second language learning, and normal processing,
- HomeBank for the study through automatic speech recognition of untranscribed daylong recordings in the home and elsewhere, and
- PhonBank for the analysis of children’s phonological development in 18 languages.
In line with its commitment to international standards for database and language technology, TalkBank joined the CLARIN federation: In 2016, TalkBank was first recognized as a CLARIN Knowledge Centre, and in 2017, it received the approval of the Core Trust Seal, which emphasizes the adoption of international standards in data access, protection of confidentiality, organizational infrastructure, data integrity, data storage, data curation, and data preservation. It is the world’s largest open access integrated repository for spoken language data, and provides several options allowing for maximal data sharing whilst also ensuring participant anonymity.
Read more about TalkBank here.