CHILDES_Lexical-diversity

This project explores children's lexical diversity and its relation with maternal vocabulary diversity, based on data from CHILDES corpus

Context/Background

• Lexical diversity of children, as one crucial component of language skills, have been investigated in abundant research. It affords the potential for communicating, socializing and learning new skills. In addition, vocabulary diversity of maternal language is found to strongly relate to children's language skills and cognitive development.
• The index of lexical diversity employed in this project is MTLD method. A concise comparison between MTLD and vocd-D (Malvern and Richards, 1997) also offered in CHILDES_Lexical-diversity.

Install essential R packages

1.childesr package

• The childesr package allows us to access data from CHILDES corpus with great convenience.

• install childesr package from GitHub repository

install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("langcog/childesr")

2. koRpus package

• The koRpus package provides handy tools to analyze text, including multiple indices of lexical diversity (e.g. type token ratio, HD-D/vocd-D, MTLD).