In the second part of our manual, we provide guidelines for analyzing and presenting an ‘acquisition sketch’ of your data – from the introductory demographic and socially-situated material through to sections and subsections on key areas of linguistic analysis. This page gives a brief overview.

The manual is written with a view to publishing the resulting sketches in the peer-reviewed open access series The Acquisition Sketch Project, Special Publication 28 of Language Documentation and Conservation. Of course, you may always choose a different publisher and/or output and you may base your approach only loosely on the sketch format, setting different priorities. But in general, a full acquisition sketch would cover all aspects of the table of contents on the left.

Do not feel that you have to account for every single piece of data. Given that five hours of recording look like a manageable dataset, there is a strong temptation to analyze every utterance within it. Yet, these five hours contain a wealth of information, including many non-interpretable utterances, and there will inevitably be cases that will elude your analysis. Keep in mind that this is a sketch description.