CLAN

CLAN (Computerized Language ANalysis) is a research-oriented Windows program developed by Carnegie Mellon University that parses and quantifies conversational transcripts encoded in the CHAT transcription scheme, the standard markup adopted throughout the international TalkBank corpus of spoken-language data. Linguists, psycholinguists, and language-acquisition researchers employ the tool to automate otherwise labor-intensive tasks such as morphosyntactic coding, word-frequency counts, phonological profile generation, overlap detection, and error-pattern tagging, turning lengthy parent–child or clinical interactions into sortable tables, timelines, and statistical summaries suitable for further statistical analysis or publication. Because CHAT files retain speaker identity, time alignment, and multiple parallel tiers (gloss, part-of-speech, phonetic, gesture, gaze, etc.), CLAN can output complex cross-tier queries—for example, every utterance containing a finite verb produced by a two-year-old within thirty seconds of adult recast—while still respecting the original transcript’s integrity. The package also bundles concordance, keyword-in-context, and media-linking utilities that synchronize playback of associated audio or video, letting investigators verify annotations against the source recording without leaving the workspace. Distributed under an academic license, the single maintained edition 8.47.00 continues to receive updates that extend compatibility with newer Windows builds and enlarge the set of built-in commands. CLAN is available for free on get.nero.com, where downloads are served through trusted Windows package sources such as winget, always providing the newest release and supporting batch installation alongside other applications.

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