New languages!

 We're pleased to announce a new release of the Wordbank database, bringing us to more than 100,000 CDI administrations! This release includes data from Japanese, Estonian, Saudi Arabic, and Catalan, as well as new data from Korean, Finnish, French, and French-English bilinguals. 

A meta-analysis of outcomes for late talkers

The extreme variability in outcome of late talkers raises challenges both for theoretical work on the sources and development of individual differences in early language development, and for clinical/educational practice. Research on long-term outcomes is sparse but growing, though primarily focused on English. There is need for increasing the research database, and especially for integration of research across languages. We are undertaking a cross-linguistic meta-analysis of outcomes for late talkers. In addition to published and unpublished papers specifically focused on this issue, we believe there are projects which may have another primary focus, but which include an early (18-36 month) assessment of expressive vocabulary, and language and/or literacy outcomes at age 5 years or beyond. The target studies can include broadly representative samples, or late talkers specifically. If you are interested in the possibility of collaboration on this project, please contact either of us listed below. You may also find the PROSPERO registration of this project helpful in understanding our plans:

https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO, registration CRD42023394687.

Emma Hayiou-Thomas, emma.hayiou-thomas@york.ac.uk

Philip Dale, dalep@unm.edu

Educational materials

Mike just taught a course at the University of Amsterdam LOT winter school on "Language Learning: A Data-Driven Approach." Here's the course description:

In this course, we will examine early language learning through the lens of new data resources that facilitate quantitative studies. Our framework will be the "Standard Model" of Kachergis, Marchman, and Frank (2022) that links language input to processing and learning outcomes, and we will consider the strengths and weaknesses of this model for describing vocabulary learning as well as the learning of some morphology and syntax. Our hands-on approach will involve learning the use of CHILDES and childes-db for studying language input, Wordbank for studying language outcomes, and Peekbank for studying processing.

Materials from Days 1 and 2 focus on Wordbank and reproduce several patterns from the Wordbank Book! All of the code and slides are available here: https://github.com/mcfrank/lot-language-learning-2023. 

Wordbank updates!

 

We are very pleased to announce a major update to Wordbank, including some significant changes to the database structure. We are also adding more than 10 new languages and data from many thousands of children. 

We now include data from multilingual children and children with diagnosed developmental disorders (as well as functionality for identifying these children via the shiny apps and the wordbankr API). 

The prior version of the Wordbank database will remain up and available for queries via the wordbankr 0.3.0 API (or earlier) for a period of at least 6 months, but if you upgrade wordbankr you will begin accessing the new Wordbank data. 

Wordbank data will also be versioned going forward so that older snapshots of the database will be available via S3 snapshots (see Documentation page). 

Wordbank Book!

We are very pleased to announce publication of the Wordbank Book, "Variability and Consistency in Early Language Learning," now available from MIT Press (2021). The book brings together many different ways of looking at data in the Wordbank database, in service of characterizing how children vary as well as shared patterns of learning. The book is also available free online at http://wordbank-book.stanford.edu, and all of the code necessary to generate it from the Wordbank data can be found at http://github.com/langcog/wordbank-book.

More languages (and some naming changes)

We are pleased to announce several pieces of news:

First, the arrival of several more languages and datasets, including French (European), more Korean data, as well as more Hebrew data and Spanish (European) in the works.

Second, we have a new licensing standard such that some datasets can be licensed Creative Commons for Non-Commercial use. These datasets are marked on the contributors page.

Finally, because of the new data, we have some new naming conventions for languages. "English" is now "English (American)"; this convention will generally be followed as "Language (Country/Region)." These are breaking changes unfortunately, we apologize for the inconvenience and are working on past database images available for purposes of reproducibility.

New frontpage and languages

Since our last update, we've reorganized the frontpage and revamped the contributors and citation policy. We've also added Latvian, Slovak, and Korean data!