Wednesday Workshop

Large-scale data tools in child language acquisition

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Facilitators: Mika Braginsky (MIT) & Michael Frank (Stanford) 

Date: July 17, 2019

Time: 10-4pm

Location: TBD

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Abstract: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use two tools for accessing large-scale language acquisition data. The first, Wordbank (Frank et al., 2016), is an open repository for parent-report data on children’s vocabularies, currently including data on over 75,000 children in 29 languages. The second, childes-db, is a structured version of the transcripts of child and child-directed speech from the Child Language Data Exchange (CHILDES; MacWhinney, 2000). We’ll demonstrate how to use these tools’ interactive web interfaces for basic data access, and how to use their custom software packages for more advanced data access and analysis. Participants with a working knowledge of the R programming language will benefit most from the software package portions of the workshop, but all students will gain ways of interacting with these tools. Our aim is to help you find ways to tailor the rich data potential of these resources to your specific research interests.