Description

Susan R. Braunwald’s (1943 ‒) career as a parent-diarist began in 1969 when she decided to combine her personal wish to care for her first child, L’s older sister J, with an equally pressing need to be intellectually productive. She kept and analyzed a language acquisition diary on J that made her wonder why, when, and how the process of language development occurred. These questions were so intriguing that Braunwald decided to keep a second language acquisition diary that was scientifically rigorous and compensated for the pitfalls of the diary method. She was an experienced parent-diarist and the design, collection, and analysis of the diary study on L, which began in 1971, became her lifelong professional commitment (Ph.D. UCLA, 1980). She is presently collaborating with Lisa Pearl on a quantitative analysis of L’s acquisition of verbs.

Braunwald created an Introduction to the Collection and an Introductory Volume in order to make the content of these naturalistic longitudinal data files accessible and user-friendly. She recommends that researchers read the Introduction and browse through the Introductory Volume as they consider whether and how the data files are applicable to their own academic disciplines.

Braunwald’s contribution of this collection is her legacy to 21st century researchers who are seeking answers to the same basic questions that led to the creation of the 9 volumes of diary data many years ago.

This research project is from the Computation of Language Laboratory at the University of California, Irvine. The Introduction and the Introductory Volume are the first and second files in the collection.