
Wordbank: An open database of children's vocabulary development - Jasamba
http://wordbank.stanford.edu/
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aidos
My wife is a speech and language therapist for under 5s and we have 2 children
under 5 ourselves. There are so many techniques she uses without even thinking
about it to encourage communication that, left on my own, I would never have
known to use. For example, in the really early days, when a child said "blah
blah blah blah" I would have been inclined to repeat it, but now I'll say
"that's right, an aeroplane!" (Or whatever it is).

Parent-child interaction goes a really long way in child development and if
you ever get the chance, it's worth sitting in on a session (whether your
child needs extra help or not). A large part of the work my wife does is
around enabling parents to assist kids that need more input (through no fault
of the parents themselves).

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vsviridov
Expected the walrus to be the logo due to an obscure meme. Was not
disappointed.

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100k
If others are curious: [http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordbank-
walrus](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/wordbank-walrus)

In a vocabulary quiz, a kid interpreted the header "wordbank" as one of the
choices.

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minimaxir
Looks like the interactivity is running in R Shiny; and I'm hitting "License
Quota Reached" errors.

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mcfrank
Yes, thanks for your interest - we only have 50 concurrent users licensed.
Never thought we'd get this much interest. :)

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rspeer
Would it be possible to mirror just the data somewhere else, such as S3?

I don't need the R code, but this sounds like it would make good companion
data to my own wordfreq [1]. It would be interesting to see which words are
learned early but relatively uncommon in corpora, and generally to be able to
measure differences in register between child and adult language.

[1]
[https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wordfreq](https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wordfreq)

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mcfrank
Very cool!

All our code is at
[http://github.com/langcog/wordbank](http://github.com/langcog/wordbank) and
you can access the database directly using the wordbankr R package (on cran).

A paper doing something similar to what you describe is in prep, with a
conference version here:

[http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/braginsky-2016-underr...](http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers_new/braginsky-2016-underrev.pdf)

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euph0ria
Comparing Swedish/Danish/English in the vocab:

[http://wordbank.stanford.edu/analyses?name=vocab_norms](http://wordbank.stanford.edu/analyses?name=vocab_norms)

Seems like data sample is too small to infer anything useful for Swedish.. but
comparing Danish and English is interesting. Seems like Danes outperform or
English kids underperform. Would be interesting to understand what the major
driver is for the effect.

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mcfrank
Hi, original researcher here - these forms have different words and different
numbers of items, so it's complicated to compare absolute proportions across
languages. I wouldn't infer that there are differences between populations
from differences in the norms.

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euph0ria
Thank you! Appreciate the answer!

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mistermann
Semi-related question: if anyone knows of something similar for physics or
chemistry (for a bit older kids) would appreciate it!

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isanganak
Funny how it says English and English(British) in those coloured bubbles :)

