An online research database of impaired and unimpaired older speakers: Research examples

from the Carolinas Conversation

Collection

Boyd H Davis, UNCC

Margaret Maclagan, University of Canterbury

Charlene Pope, MUSC

Contact us: bdavis@uncc.edu margaret.maclagan@canterbury.ac.nz popec@musc.edu

Acknowledgement: “The project described was supported by Grant Number G08LM009624 from the National Library of Medicine. The content is solely the

responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Library Of Medicine or the National Institutes of Health.”

CCC offers two cohorts of multiethnic older

speakers

• (1) men and women 65+ with chronic conditions who have two conversational interviews, one with young clinicians, and one with community partners, usually of their own age and ethnicity;

• (2) men and women 65+ with cognitive impairment, usually Alzheimer’s, who have one to ten conversations over time, with researchers and student volunteers.

Formats

• Text is transcribed and time-aligned

• Can be listened to as well as read

• Search functions by word or phrase

• Linguistic analysis

• Automatic phonetic/phonemic transcription

• Automatic syntactic analysis

• Automatic acoustic analysis (Praat)

Praat, Celex, Stanford parser—access to all is

built in

An invitation:http://carolinaconversations.musc.edu/abou

t/

• Use it, Donate to it

• Empirical research examples for older and oldest old:

• Pauses in narratives, syntax, extenders, computational analysis,

• Social identities, story fragments, small stories, story repetitions,

• Multimodality, membership categorization…