list of common words

Fri Jun 6 16:03:28 UTC 2014

Dear Phil and others,

I didn't jump in because we ended up using a printed word source--but since you're looking at reading...

I am doing a project on narrative with a colleague in Communication Disorders here at UMass Amherst, Giang Pham.  We kept coming across the term "tier 1" (and "tier 2 and 3" words), which I think comes from the Common Core, attributed to Isabel Beck, Margaret McKeown, and colleagues.  When we looked for an authoritative (quantitative) source, we didn't find one.   In fact, the basis seems to be guidelines for choosing which words will be most useful for one's own students.

Anyway, I found an on-line word frequency database for children's printed word frequencies. (Children's Printed Word Database)
I don't recommend it above others except that it's easy to access and (very) straightforward to use.  (I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but I may easily have missed a posting or two.)

http://www.essex.ac.uk/psychology/cpwd/
(University of Essex, an ESRC funded project.)
last updated 2003

I put in a bunch of the words we wanted to call "tier 2" and ones that we questioned.   But it's still hard to decide on a cut-off--and probably situation-specific.

We didn't need to go further with it, but maybe someone on the list has more familiarity with this tiered vocabulary discussion.  On the other hand, you might be hoping to tie off this thread.  We've certainly already gotten a lot of good leads.

Best wishes,

Barbara
************************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Co-director, Language Acquisition Research Center
c/o Linguistics, 226 South College
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst MA 01003

bpearson at research.umass.edu<mailto:bpearson at research.umass.edu>
http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
http://www.zurer.com/pearson

On Jun 6, 2014, at 11:36 AM, Philip Dale wrote:

Thanks to everyone for all their help and suggestions. Clearly there are many ways in which frequency can important, depending on the research questions. The immediate stimulus for my message was not particularly about child language; I just assumed that there would be lots of expertise on this list, and I was right! I'm actually interested in using proportion of rare words (either as a dichotomy, or a mean level of frequency in the corpus database) as a potential 'semantic' aspect of readability of text not captured by most existing measures which primarily use word and sentence length. We'll also be looking at syntactic complexity, especially in terms of independent clauses and temporal/causal/hierarchical structure. Ultimately the goal is to clarify individual differences in reading ability.
Philip Dale

From: info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com> [mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Javier
Sent: Friday, June 06, 2014 8:32 AM
To: info-childes at googlegroups.com<mailto:info-childes at googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: list of common words

Since you are mentioning 'a software available to scan a passage', and considering that we are in info-childes (and to my knowledge nobody mentioned it here) this simple command (assuming that your passage is saved in plain txt) would pool out a list of words in the passage (sorted by descending frequency):

freq +y +o your_passage.txt

Hope this helps,
Javier

El jueves, 5 de junio de 2014 16:19:31 UTC+2, Dale, Philip escribió:
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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