childeswordfreq

Nahar Albudoor

childeswordfreq is an R package for extracting word and phrase frequencies from the CHILDES database using the childesr API. It enables users to:

• Get word counts by speaker role with word_counts().
• Count surface phrases in utterance text with phrase_counts().
• Normalize frequencies by corpus size or utterance count.
• Export results as Excel workbooks with full metadata for replication.

The primary functions are:

• word_counts() for type- or token-based frequencies by speaker role, with optional stemming, MOR-tier filtering, wildcard matching, normalization, and Zipf scaling.
• phrase_counts() for surface phrase counts in utterance text, with optional wildcard patterns and per-utterance normalization.

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Requirements

childeswordfreq does not require CLAN or local copies of CHILDES corpora. All queries go through childesr. Optional on-disk caching can be enabled to speed up repeated CHILDES queries.

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Installation

# CRAN
install.packages("childeswordfreq")

# Or install the development version from GitHub
# remotes::install_github("n-albudoor/childeswordfreq")
install.packages("childeswordfreq", repos = c('https://n-albudoor.r-universe.dev', 'https://cloud.r-project.org'))

Then load the package:

library(childeswordfreq)

The package depends on childesr and its requirements. An active internet connection is required as all queries are executed through the TalkBank API.

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Usage & Best Practices

For more detailed guidance on using the package, see the vignette:

browseVignettes("childeswordfreq-best-practices")

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License

MIT.

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