name change from SLABank to BilingBank
Brian MacWhinney
I am still in the process of trying to better organize the
relation between corpora of bilingual interactions and second language
interactions in the TalkBank database. From several points of view,
it seems best to include corpora of both bilingual interactions and
second language learner interactions in the same general database.
First, many of the participants in the current SLA corpora are
bilinguals, although in some cases their proficiency in the new
language is not yet native. This is also true of the childhood
bilingual In other cases, they are beginners. However, there are many
stages in language learning and there is no simple way to set up a
clear border between bilingualism and SLA. Second, there is a common
set of computational tools and analyses for these two areas and
workers in each area are often interested in topics in the other.
For these two reasons, after consulting with people, I decided
to merge the two bilingual data sets in TalkBank. The previous names
of the database segments were SLA and LIDES. The new segment is
called BilingBank and includes all of the materials that were in SLA
and LIDES. In order to match up this mailing group with the relevant
database, and to put this data set on parallel with others such as
AphasiaBank, CABank, and PhonBank, I would now like to rename this
list as bilin...@googlegroups.com. Google makes it easy to change
the name and I will now go ahead with doing this. You will be
automatically resubscribed. However, if you have stored the string sla...@googlegroups.com
in your mailer, you will want to delete that and use bilin...@googlegroups.com
instead. New messages will be coming from this new address, which I
will test directly after sending off this message.
Many thanks for your patience and understanding during this
reorganizational process.
-- Brian MacWhinney, CMU