Introducing ELAN for Analyses of Spoken Languages

Abstract

ELAN is free software that is designed to annotate and transcribe streams of audio and video data. It is developed and maintained by Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and runs on various operating systems. ELAN is widely used by researchers who analyze human behaviors, including but not limited to linguistic activities (e.g., single talk and conversation) and body movements (e.g., sign language and gestures). One main reason for its widespread acceptance is its convenience and ease of use. ELAN is very suitable for spoken/unspoken language researchers who often need to synchronize audio and/or video with transcriptions, replay specific parts of data repetitively, and summarize tagged data, and so on. The present paper introduces the useful functions of ELAN for quantitative and qualitative analyses of spoken languages to those who would like to learn ELAN. Specifically, the present paper introduces (1) the documentation functions of the spoken languages, (2) how to export the tagged data created with ELAN, and (3) the functions linking ELAN to Praat, which is another widely used software in the analysis of spoken languages.