• PPAnnotation

Guide to Excel Annotation Sheets

Annotation Instructions for the Transcription of Recordings

1. Transcribe "verbatim", without correcting grammatical errors: "I seen him," "me and him gone to the movies," etc. Mark noticable pauses with a series of forward-slashes approximating the length, separated from the text by spaces.

2. End each utterance with a space and then a period.

3. Disfluencies should be marked by adding a code to the end of the relevant transcription, before the following space

• Delays of the next word:
  • Pauses/Hesitations (/ short // medium pause /// long pause) @pa
  • Filled pauses (um, uh) @fp
  • Fillers (e.g. "I mean, like, you know, ...) @fi
• Restarts:
  • Word repetitions/repair @wr
  • Sentence restarts @sr
• Phonological and phonetic reduction/lengthening:
  • Stretching out a word @ln
  • Reductions and contractions @rd

4. When a word or phrase is not clear, type double parentheses (( )) around what you think you hear. If there is no way to tell what the speaker said, leave 1 blank space between the double parentheses, indicating speech has been left out because it was unintelligible.

5. Do not try to imitate pronunciation in the main transcription; use a dictionary form followed by "@rd": "no@rd" will do for "naw," "nah," etc.,; "going to@rd" for "gonna" or "goin' to"; "you all@rd" rather than "y'all"; etc. Nonstandard words which are not in the dictionary (e.g., kiddo) should be typed normally, i.e. without quotes or other special notation.

6. Hesitation sounds: use "uh" for all hesitations consisting of a vowel sound (rather than trying to distinguish uh, ah, er, etc.), and "um" for all hestitations with a nasal sound (rather than uhm, hm, mm, etc.) separated from the text by a space.

7. Punctuation: although normal punctuation rules apply, spontaneous conversational speech is full of difficult situations. Strive for simplicity and consistency, with the following specific guidelines:

• terminate each sentence with a space and then a period unless a question mark or exclamation point is clearly justified;
• use a comma instead of ... or -- when speakers change thoughts or grammatical structures in the middle of a sentence

8. Partial words: if a speaker does not finish a word, and you think you know what the word was, you may spell out as much of the word as is pronounced, and then use a single dash followed by a comma, -,. If you cannot tell what word the speaker is trying to say, leave it out.

9. The verb and the object in the sentence will need to be transcribed into their phonetic pronunciation. Use the following scheme: BR

Example annotation file

The CSV file linked to below is an example from a project on phonological similarity effects on fluency during sentence production.

annotation-example.csv Example file