Robin Lee Powell wrote:
On Sun, Jan 09, 2011 at 06:44:17AM -0500, Bob LeChevalier, President and Founder - LLG wrote:John E Clifford wrote:Portable recorder (a pen size say) and transcription at the end of each day. Textbooks cover very little of a typical 10-year-old's life, nor would adding in books, tv and games cover the whole very well.I believe that there already exist such corpora; I had access to one several years ago, called CHILDES. I don't remember the age range. http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/ seems to be the current site, and it looks like they've accomplished a lot since I last looked.That looks really complicated. If there's a way to extract "here's a list of words/concepts that any language should/must be able to easily express", I don't see how to do it. If you could explore the site to find that, it would be really helpful.
I tried for that a long time ago, but it was going to take more time and/or expertise than I had. Someone in the community may know the field of corpora better than I do, and can step in here.
Of course, for basic concepts, we still have the Helen Eaton semantic frequency list, of the most used word-concepts in 4 lanaguages. That was JCB's standard for vocabulary completeness, and it conveniently is based on concepts as much as on "word", which is always the flaw of working with corpora. But it isn't a "childs" list, either.
I think it would be better than anything we could quickly extract from a database like CHILDES, since this really is a "research project" sort of thing, and if we were truly going to do research in this field we should try to get Chinese and Hindi and Arabic and Russian and Spanish corpora, and not just English ones (Eaton at least has the Spanish along with English).
We have a couple of copies of Eaton here (I think they really are "copies" and aren't in great shape) and I note that people can purchase copies through amazon and alibris and elsewhere for #20-30 - probably of the out-of-print Dover edition.
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