CHILDES database

The Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES) was established in 1984 to serve as a central repository for first language acquisition data. Its earliest transcripts date from the 1960's, and it now has contents (transcripts, audio, and video) in over 20 languages from 130 different corpora, all of which is publically available.

During the early 1990's, as computational resources capable of easily manipulating the data volumes found in CHILDES became commonly available, there was significant increase in the number of studies of child language acquisition that made use of it. To date, there are over 1500 published studies citing CHILDES.