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Case Study Examples

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SALT FAQ - Spanish Transcription

Q. How do you type the accented Spanish characters?
A. The Spanish character set is not built into the SALT program. The Windows® operating system, however, allows you to change the keyboard setting to include the Spanish characters. Follow the steps listed below to change your keyboard setting.
  • Click the "Start" button.
  • Select "Settings" from the Start menu. 
  • Select "Control Panel" from the Settings menu.
  • Select "Keyboard" from the "Control Panel". 
  • Click on the "Language" tab.
  • It is assumed that the current language is English. Click the "Properties" button.
  • Click the black arrow to the right of the current keyboard layout. 
  • Select "United States-International" from the list. 
  • Click OK to exit the language properties dialog box.
  • Click OK to exit the keyboard properties dialog box.

Once the keyboard is changed to United States-International, you can access most of the special characters in SALT and most other programs by holding down the RIGHT ALT key when you type these characters.

Hold down the RIGHT ALT key and type: to get:
a or Aá or Á
e or Eé or É
i or Ií or Í
o or Oó or Ó
u or Uú or Ú
n or Nñ or Ñ
? or ! (without the shift key)¿ or ¡

To get ü or Ü, type a double-quote (") followed by u or U. Note that when you type the double-quote, nothing happens until you type the next character. To produce the double-quote, type the double-quote followed by some other character such as a blank space.

Type: to get:
" and uü
" and UÜ
" and space"

Alternatively, you may prefer to type in your transcript using Microsoft® Word or some other word processor and then either save your transcript as a text file with the extension .slt or create a new transcript in SALT and then cut and paste the transcript from your word processor into the SALT transcript window.
Q. Does the language switch to Spanish, English, or Combined only affect the word lists? If a child only says 1 or 2 words in English throughout the entire transcript, should the "Combined" language setting still be used? What impact does this have?
A. Yes, switching from "Spanish" to "Combined" only affects the standard word lists. So it is best to used the "Combined" setting in this instance.
Q. Do you link verbs to their following preposition? A huge one that always came up was, "ir a". Should it be transcribed as "ir_a"? What about other verbs that typically are followed by a preposition?
A. That is up to you. The only non-morphological verb conjugation that we have linked is the periphrastic future (e.g., va_a_correr|correr). We did this strictly to track Spanish dialectal variation, since this "verb tense" may be gradually replacing the morphological future tense in some Spanish dialects.
Q. Clitic Confusion: Do you use + with reflexives or not? There was an example on the clitics help section, "El se para", which suggested that a clitic + should be used... but other examples on other sections suggested that reflexives only receive the [X] code. For example, on the Reflexive/non-reflexive pronouns page, "Raul se[X] fue con la food."
A. The clitics transcription marker "+" can be used in both freestanding and attached clitics. In fact, it is probably more informative to mark both types of clitics. In short, yes mark both reflexive and non-reflexive pronominal clitics.
Q. Should a phrase like "yo me voy" be coded with the verb "ir" or the reflexive "irse"? Should it be "yo me voy|ir" or "yo me voy|irse"?
A. It should be marked with it's stem verb alone, "ir". There isn't any need to mark it with the reflexive. The reflexive is the pronominal clitic "me". Thus, transcribe it as "yo +me voy|ir"