Alternations coding protocol for RAs
Protocol describing what to do for alterations of words.
Go to BergelsonLab/Alternations list to find the excel file called audio_alternations. In this file, you’ll see 12 columns, but the ones of focus for you are object and basic_level.
The last 4 columns are for you to fill out: notable, and then three alternation columns. Your job is to describe the differences between the object and basic level columns by using a numeric coding system. Each type of alternation will get a number.
The vast majority of the columns will differ in the following ways:
There will be adjectives added to one column and those won’t be present in the other. This gets coded with a 1. Example: the basic level is “book” and the object is “A+b+c+book”
One of the words will be plural and one will be singular. It doesn’t matter which word is in which column. This gets coded with a 2.
Both columns will be identical but the first letter is capitalized on one. You can delete these rows after you have quadruple checked that they’re the same.
The Notable column
Everything else will fall into a category called “notable.” For notable alternations, you put an asterisk in the notable column.
Then, in the alternation columns, you can code as follows:
3 means reduplication. Ex: If the basic level is “pig” or “piggy” and the object is “piggy+piggy” or “piggy+piggy+piggy” or any number of the same word repeated. This also applies to partial repetitions, like "pig+piggy" or "piggy+pig+pig"
If there's an added –y on a word, code this a 4. Ex: If the basic level is “pig” and the object is “piggy”
Anything else that can’t be described in the above ways gets a 5. This could be that parts of a word have been deleted, that the vowels have been changed, that a rhyming nonsense word has been added, or any other alternation that can’t be described with 1-4.
Words can alternate in any combination of these ways. Let’s keep with our pig example. “Little+piggy+piggies” gets a 1, 2 and a 4. Put one number per column. If you find a word that needs four columns to capture what’s going on, you can add a new column and put the final number there. Please fill the columns in in numerical order. With our above example, the first alternation column should get the number 1, the second column should get a 2, and the third should get a 4.
Additional things that should get an asterisk in the notable column:
If there’s a non-color adjective that’s going with more than 15 words, put an asterisk on the first one. So for example if there’s “baby+radio” and “baby+car” and 25 other words that take “baby” as an adjective, flag that.
Plurals that are formed by changing the vowel. Foot/feet, man/men, etc.
If the added material on a word is the sound that the object makes, flag that. Example: if frog is "ribbit+frog"
IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO ON A LINE, ASK CHARLOTTE.
To summarise:
Code Number Meaning
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