Proposal view
| Proposal Type: | Individual Thematic Poster |
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| Domain: | Learning and Instructional Technology |
| SIG: | Writing |
| Equipment |
| Paper Details |
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| Title | Are frequency dictionaries specific for children necessary? Comparative study of a child and adult lexical frequency dictionaries |
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| Abstract | Our work will organise in two main parts. First of all we will present a Frequency Dictionary that we have developed for the lexical units that a child will encounter during its reading experiences during the six years of the Spanish primary school. We will describe the special procedure we have used to gather the almost 100.944 entries that this dictionary it contains. In the second part of the poster we will compare by means of Pearson correlations the and regression analysis the frequencies of different entries in our work and in two adult frequency dictionaries in order to determine if the child dictionary is different enough from the adult versions to justify its own entity. |
| Summary | Presentation of the frequency dictionary for child population The aim of our work is to compare a frequency dictionary for children with an adult one in order to see if the first one has its own idiosyncrasy and entity. The content of our work will be organised in two main parts. In the first one, we will present the children frequency dictionary that we have developed for the lexical entries that an average child will encounter during his / her reading experiences along the six years of the Spanish primary school. We will describe in detail the main guidelines that we have followed to gather the 100.944 entries of the dictionary. In short, we have registered the voluntarily read books of a sample of children (8 for each course) and we have processed all the words that those books had. In addition to that, we have processed the compulsory readings that the same sample of children could have done on the textbooks. Following this method we have compiled six dictionaries (one for each course) and an accumulated version with all the words and accumulated frequencies that an average child will encounter during the entire primary school readings. Is this last version the one that we will be using for the purpose of comparison with the adult dictionary. Comparison of the child dictionary figures with those of the adult one In the second part of our work we will present the main figures of our accumulated dictionary and we will compare them with those of a well known adult dictionary for written lexical entries. In doing that we will analyse the percentage of common and specific words that the dictionaries have and we will use Pearson correlation and regression analysis with the frequencies of the shared words. Three main conclusions can be followed from this analysis: (1) when considering the common words included in both dictionaries there is an excellent Pearson correlation between the frequencies of both dictionaries (r = 0,986). (2) Despite this high Pearson correlation slightly more than fifty five percent (55,25%) of the words of both dictionaries are common (44,75% of the words of the child dictionary are specific of this population dictionary and are not present in the adult one, and 31,43% of the words of the adult dictionary are specific for the adult population dictionary and are not present in the child one). (3) A regression analysis of the shared words of both dictionaries shows that there are a number of words with discrepant frequencies (more that 1,28 Z above or below the predicted score). That means that there are words with high frequencies in the adult dictionary but that have very low frequencies in the child one. Two hundreds and fifty two words such as mujer, hombre, sociedad, teoria, amor, ciencia, politica, estructura, universidad, investigacion, violencia, produccion, gobierno (woman, man, society, theory, love, science, policy, structure, university, research, violence, production, government) are in this group. On the other hand, there is another group of words with the reverse discrepancy. This means that there are words with significantly higher frequencies in the child dictionary than in the adult one. Seven hundred and forty seven words such as madre, senor, padre, cuaderno, abuelo, cabeza, animales, manana, leon, rey, senorita, habitacion, bosque (mather, mister/sir, father, notebook, grandfather, head, animals, tomorrow/morning, lion, king, lady, room, wood) belong to this second group. Despite the apparent good Pearson correlation for the frequencies of the common words of both dictionaries (and the use of the accumulated dictionary for the six primary courses) the data suggest that a specific dictionary for children should be used when we intend to analyze or study the frequency variable effects for children population in reading and writing experiments. We assume that the data would have been even more discrepant and clear, if we had analyze the same data in any of the first courses of the primary school years instead of the accumulated version. |
| Keywords | Early reading Reading Vocabulary |
| Appendices | |
| Authors | ||||||
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| Name | Surname | Institution | Country | EARLI Number | Presenting | |
| Jesus | Martinez | Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca | Spain | jmartinezma@upsa.es | ||
| Emma | Garcia | Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca | Spain | megarciape@upsa.es | * | |
