Dear Brie,
I agree that it is time to replace use of the @n special form with more specific and diagnostic coding. What people have called neologisms seem to fall into three general classes. First, there are morphological marking errors (omissions, overgeneralizations, undergeneralizations, wrong affix) that are best handled through the use, first of the [: target] replacement form in order to allow MOR to work smoothly. Second, there are forms that are something like non-words. For these, the target is just not clear and it would be best to mark them using some other special marker, such as @b, @c, or @wp. Third, there are occasionally forms that seem like true “creative” neologisms, often based on compounding or analogy with some other forms. My sense is that the amount of true “creative” neologism in CHILDES or AphasiaBank is rather low. So, converting the @n forms to something more accurate and diagnostic would be a good idea. I don’t think this is a major problem for AphasiaBank, because Davida used the newer system for error coding.
Let me add a bit of history. Back in the 70s, people were quite concerned about not characterizing child forms as “errors”. In part, that was the reason for relying on the @n marker for tagging various error forms neologisms. In addition, the error coding scheme that we developed in the 80s was so cumbersome that it was actually never used. About 9 years ago, Davida and I worked out the newer error coding system and we could use this scheme to reformat the uses of @n to either the error coding format or else other special form markers, perhaps leaving a few true neologisms
— Brian
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