list of common words

Thu Jun 5 18:24:29 UTC 2014

I asked my colleague Hans Stadthagen-Gonzalez about this, and he replied
with the following, which may be of some help:

I don’t know of any list of 3000 words per se, but there are several word
frequency corpora that could easily be used for this. Out of the top of my
head,  CELEX or the British National Corpus (BNC) are widely used and each
has a very large sample but are both for British English. A good
alternative for American English is Brysbaert’s SubtlexUS, which is based
on movie subtitles and has been shown to explain a large portion of
variance in word recognition (in other words, it’s a good sample). You can
find more info here:expsy.ugent.be/subtlexus/

If you need frequency counts for particular age groups, there’s the
Educator’s Word Frequency Guide, which is stratified by school grade and
based on reading materials from Kindergarten through 12+ grade.

Going back to the question, I would not frame it in terms of 3K words and
whatever is not on the list is considered “rare”, but in terms of a cutoff
frequency below which words are considered infrequent. The cutoff would be
somewhat arbitrary and dependent on the purpose of the study (but there is
literature out there discussing this issue).

Best,

V. C. Mueller Gathercole
Professor of Linguistics
Coordinator PhD Program
Florida International University

http://vcmuellergathercole.weebly.com/index.html

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On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 11:42 AM, Philip Dale <dalep at unm.edu> wrote:

>  Thanks so much. I should have been clearer at the outset. In this case,
> I’m interested in adult-adult speech (for adult-child speech, as in
> Goodman, Dale & Li, 2008, we used a FREQ analysis of CHILDES corpora).
>
> COCA looks the best, as it actually has word frequencies. On first
> examination, BNC is just the corpora, and you’d have to do the analyses
> yourself. But I might be wrong here.
>
> Philip
>
>
>
> *From:* info-childes at googlegroups.com [mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Hedvig Skirgård
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 05, 2014 9:29 AM
>
> *To:* info-childes at googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* Re: list of common words
>
>
>
> Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA):
> http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/
> British National Corpus (BNC http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/
>
> /Hedvig
>
>
>
> 2014-06-05 17:23 GMT+02:00 Philip Dale <dalep at unm.edu>:
>
> Could you spell those out?
>
>
>
> *From:* info-childes at googlegroups.com [mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Hedvig Skirgård
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 05, 2014 9:22 AM
>
>
> *To:* info-childes at googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* Re: list of common words
>
>
>
> You want adult-adult frequencies right? Why not just use the COCA or BNC?
>
>
> /Hedvig
>
>
>
> 2014-06-05 17:08 GMT+02:00 Nan Bernstein Ratner <nratner at umd.edu>:
>
> We did what the earlier posting suggested, filtered our child-addressed
> speech samples through this in CLAN (e.g., -s at lexrare), and then
> additionally cleaned up proper names for a proportion of maternal/paternal
> input that consisted of relatively rare words.
>
>
>
> Nan
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* info-childes at googlegroups.com [mailto:
> info-childes at googlegroups.com] *On Behalf Of *Philip Dale
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 05, 2014 11:06 AM
>
>
> *To:* info-childes at googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* RE: list of common words
>
>
>
> Yes, I’m pretty sure this is it; thanks, Nan. Did you use software to
> determine frequencies?
>
> Philip
>
>
>
> *From:* info-childes at googlegroups.com [
> mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com <info-childes at googlegroups.com>] *On
> Behalf Of *Nan Bernstein Ratner
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 05, 2014 8:46 AM
> *To:* info-childes at googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* RE: list of common words
>
>
>
> I think this is what folks want. My memory is that it was prepared by
> Patton Tabors of Harvard Grad School of Ed; we have used it in a few
> studies. I hope this attachment will go through. I do not know if there are
> others; this is the one we have used.
>
>
>
> Best to all,
>
> Nan
>
>
>
>
>
> *From:* info-childes at googlegroups.com [
> mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com <info-childes at googlegroups.com>] *On
> Behalf Of *Erika Hoff
> *Sent:* Thursday, June 05, 2014 10:30 AM
> *To:* info-childes at googlegroups.com
> *Subject:* Re: list of common words
>
>
>
> Me too.
>
>
>
> Erika
>
>
>
> On Thu, Jun 5, 2014 at 10:25 AM, Tager-Flusberg, Helen B <htagerf at bu.edu>
> wrote:
>
>  Philip,
>
> I too am interested in this information ---can you send me useful replies?
>
>
>
> thanks!
>
> Helen
>
> _________________________________
>
> Helen Tager-Flusberg, Ph.D.
>
> Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Boston University
>
> Professor of Anatomy & Neurobiology and Pediatrics, BUSM
>
>
>
> Address
>
> Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences
>
> Center for Autism Research Excellence
>
> 100 Cummington Mall
>
> Boston MA 02215
>
> T:  617-358-5919
>
> htagerf at bu.edu
>
> www.bu.edu/autism
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jun 5, 2014, at 10:19 AM, Philip Dale <dalep at unm.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
>   I have the memory that there is a list somewhere of the 3000 (?) most
> common words in English, which can be used by exclusion to measure the use
> of ‘rare’ words. Can someone point me to that list? Even better, is there
> software available to scan a passage and compute the number of common vs.
> rare wrods?  Many thanks.
>
> Philip Dale
>
>
>
>
>
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