Wordbank: an open repository for developmental vocabulary data

Abstract

The MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs) are a widely used family of parent-report instruments for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about early language acquisition. CDI data have been used to explore a variety of theoretically important topics, but, with few exceptions, researchers have had to rely on data collected in their own lab. In this paper, we remedy this issue by presenting Wordbank, a structured database of CDI data combined with a browsable web interface. Wordbank archives CDI data across languages and labs, providing a resource for researchers interested in early language, as well as a platform for novel analyses. The site allows interactive exploration of patterns of vocabulary growth at the level of both individual children and particular words. We also introduce wordbankr, a software package for connecting to the database directly. Together, these tools extend the abilities of students and researchers to explore quantitative trends in vocabulary development.

Numerical morphology supports early number word learning: Evidence from a comparison of young Mandarin and English learners

“…Further support for this claim comes from studies that have established that one- and two-year-old Mandarin learners have larger vocabularies than American English learners of the same age (e.g., Hao et al, 2015; Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999; vocabulary norming results from Frank, Braginsky, Yurovsky, & Marchman, in press), and that middle-class Chinese three-year-olds have stronger executive function than middle-class American three-year-olds (Sabbagh, Xu, Carlson, Moses, & Lee, 2006). Thus, Chinese children seem to be overall more efficient learners than American children at the ages studied here.…”

Individual Differences in Language Acquisition and Processing

“…Here, the term is used to refer to first (i.e., native) language acquisition. nicative Development Inventory vocabulary production data from 4687 English-speaking children aged 16-30 months [37]. This is a checklist where caregivers mark whether their child produces certain words and communicative behaviors.…”

“…Initial vocabulary development is slow, but the rate at which children acquire vocabulary soon differentiates fast from slow (and average) developers. For instance, vocabulary production norms from Wordbank shows that a child in the 90th percentile at 16 months knows the same number of words as a child in 10th percentile at 26 months [37] i . Perhaps more surprisingly, children's grammatical competence also varies across development [38].…”

Relating unsupervised word segmentation to reported vocabulary acquisition

“…Table 1 gives some details about the corpus. For evaluating word segmentation al- gorithms on infant reported lexicon, we used American English language data available on the WordBank repository [13], corresponding to the "Words and Gestures" form of the CDI. Most of these items are nouns (e.g., ball) but there are also other classes, such as verbs (watch), function words (you), adjectives (big) and even onomatopeia (baa).…”

“…These reports are typically collected using the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventory (CDI for short [12]), a standardized questionnaire containing more than 400 items. The CDI has been translated in several language and has been collected in a large quantity of families in the WordBank repository [13]. Recently, CDI comprehension data have been used to look at the earliest words that infants acquire and age of acquisition for each of these words has been estimated across several languages.…”