While some linguistics can be done while socially distanced, one subfield that especially suffers is language acquisition.

In light of that, I’d like to present childes-coder v0.1, a utility to do corpus studies on CHILDES from the comfort of your own quarantine.

childes-coder is a utility written in Shiny which allows you to view relevant tokens in CHILDES in context (using the wonderful childes-db and childesr packages), code them for a variety of characteristics, and download the tokens, along with any codings, in a CSV file.

Here it is set up for a corpus study of child-directed speech containing the word even.

I’ve set up a demo at https://childes-coder.shinyapps.io/childes-coder/.

The readme on Github is currently quite scant beyond the installation process, but I am working on changing that.

(Thank you to Leo Rosenstein, Elise Newman, Naomi Francis and Shuli Jones for helping trial earlier versions!)