Multilingual phonological corpus analysis

In this chapter, I describe the PhonBank database initiative within the larger CHILDES project. After a brief introduction to these inter-related database systems, I move the focus on the types of corpus annotations and analyses which we support within PhonBank, through the Phon software program. Phon greatly facilitates a number of tasks required for the analysis of phonological development. It supports multimedia data linkage, unit segmentation, multiple-blind transcription, automatic labelling of data, and systematic comparisons between target (model) and actual (produced) phonological forms. Building on this description, I then provide a practical illustration in the context of a multilingual study of phonology, taking as an example the analysis of data on the phonological adaptation of linguistic borrowings (loanwords).