# Extending PhonBank for Clinical Phonology and Speech Analysis

> **NIH NIH R01** · CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY · 2020 · $269,084

## Abstract

The study of phonological development has important implications for the
diagnosis, understanding, and treatment of developmental language disorders. It
also has implications for the understanding of language patterns in stuttering,
disfluency, aphasia, bilingualism, second language learning, and dementia.
Recent computational advances now make it possible for researchers to link high
quality digital recordings to phonological and phonetic transcriptions. Using
standards such as Unicode, IPA, and XML, and the infrastructure developed in
the CHILDES Project, the PhonBank database project now provides universal
Internet access to large corpora of transcripts linked to audio for the study of
phonological developemnt.
PhonBank also provides the Phon program that automates creation and analysis
of these new corpora. The construction of this database is being be supported by
a group of 60 researchers and their students who have agreed to contribute
already collected and transcribed corpora from children learning 25 different
languages. Subjects include bilingual children, normally-developing
monolinguals, and children with language disorders. The data are being
structured to facilitate testing of models regarding babbling universals, variant
paths in segmental and prosodic development, markedness effects, prosodic
context effects, segmentation patterns, statistical learning, frequency effects,
interlanguage transfer, diagnosis of disability, stuttering patterns, disfluency
patterns, and the effects of morphology and syntax.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9832678
- **Project number:** 5R01HD051698-14
- **Recipient organization:** CARNEGIE-MELLON UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** BRIAN MACWHINNEY
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $269,084
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2006-08-01 → 2021-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9832678

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9832678, Extending PhonBank for Clinical Phonology and Speech Analysis (5R01HD051698-14). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9832678. Licensed CC0.

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