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Reviews the literature on the role and application of music therapy in special education in an Australian context. Notes that music therapy in Australia is practiced in medical contexts, education contexts, and in private practice and community programs. (DB)

The CHAT transcription standard of the Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES), the world's largest computer archive of child language data, is critiqued. CHAT is being considered as a possible standard for the field of child language as a whole. It is argued that CHAT is biased toward three views that are no longer current in the field: (1) toward written rather than spoken language; (2) toward a reductionist, compositional perspective on language and discourse; and (3) toward the view of child language as defective adult language rather than as systematic in its own right. A minimalist standard is proposed that is consistent with mainstream tenets, less theory-committed, and more readable than CHAT. It also can be accommodated by CHILDES' existing computer programs, and it enables exhaustive searches necessary for unbiased results. The minimalist proposal advocated is summarized in the appendix, which also contains tables on the following: CHAT's utterance delimiters; an example of a prosodically-based alternative to CHAT's unit-final delimiters; a comparison of Bloom's original format and CHILDES' version of the data in CHAT format; Bloom's data modified as necessary for line-oriented searching; CHAT's "special form" tags; and a sample from Clark's data on CHILDES in a non-CHAT minimalist format. (LB)

The results of an examination of computer data formatting and data analysis strategies from two diverse second language projects and their implications for establishing standards are outlined in the form of suggested formatting conventions and analysis procedures. The formatting suggestions address the issues of distinguishing line types, avoidance of needless variation and random error in typing, the scope of comments and codes, coding, and sub-units or analytic subdivisions within the text. The analysis strategies focus on data selection, data organization to reveal regularities, and data modification through computer-assisted coding. The importance of selecting formatting conventions that are theoretically flexible, computationally flexible, readable by the human eye, quick to type onto the computer, robust against typing error, and expandable is emphasized, and the establishment of a minimal set of conventions to serve as an international standard and to facilitate collaboration and data exchange across projects, including comparisons with first language acquisition research, is supported. (MSE)