Speaker Filtering

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-03-30 13:40 EDT

In multi-party conversations, it is often useful to focus on a single speaker’s contributions. The speaker filtering feature creates a read-only filtered view of the transcript showing only the utterances from selected speakers.

How to Use

1. Open a .cha file.
2. Invoke the command using any of these methods:
   • Context menu: right-click in the editor, then select Filter by Speaker…
   • Command Palette: Cmd+Shift+P (macOS) / Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux), then type TalkBank: Filter by Speaker
3. A multi-select picker appears listing all speakers defined in the file’s @Participants header.
4. Select one or more speakers and confirm.
5. A filtered read-only document opens in a side-by-side panel.

What the Filtered View Shows

The filtered document includes:

• All file headers – @UTF8, @Begin, @Participants, @ID, @Languages, @Media, and all other @ headers are preserved so the document remains structurally valid.
• Selected speakers’ utterance blocks – each main tier line for the selected speakers, along with all their dependent tiers (%mor, %gra, %pho, etc.).
• No other speakers – utterance blocks from non-selected speakers are omitted entirely.

The filtered view is a virtual document – it does not modify the original file on disk. The language server still processes it, so you get full validation, highlighting, and hover information even in the filtered view.

Use Cases

• Focus on child speech: filter to CHI only to review a child’s productions without the surrounding adult turns.
• Examine interviewer questions: filter to INV to see just the interviewer’s prompts.
• Compare two speakers: select both CHI and MOT to see the mother-child dyad without other participants.
• Quick utterance review: combine with the Document Symbols outline to jump between the filtered speaker’s utterances.

Related Chapters

• Document Symbols – rename, find references, and code lens for speaker codes
• Scoped Find – search within specific tiers or speakers without creating a filtered view
• Cross-Tier Alignment – hover and highlighting work in the filtered view
• CLAN Analysis Commands – many CLAN commands accept --speaker flags for per-speaker analysis