Re: [kidsgames] word familiarity

[Jeffery Douglas Waddell <jeff@smluc.org>]

Hello,

On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Paul Kienzle wrote:

> >we have several gpl dictionaries, it may be nice to rate the word age
> >appropriateness for the words that are out there.  /usr/share/dict/words
> >and the dictd program come to mind.
> 
> The MRC Psycholinguistics Database rates familiarity for some 9400 nouns:
> 
> 	FAM
> 
> 	This stands for 'printed familiarity'. The FAM  values  were  de-
> 	rived from merging three sets of familiarity norms: Pavio (unpub-
> 	lished), Toglia and Battig (1978) and Gilhooly and Logie  (1980).
> 	The  method by which these three sets of norms were merged is de-
> 	scribed in detail in  Appendix  2  of  the  MRC  Psycholinguistic
> 	Database User Manual (Coltheart, 1981a). This method may not meet
> 	with everyone's approval. FAM values lie in the range 100 to  700
> 	with the maximum entry of 657, a mean of 488 and a standard devi-
> 	ation of 99: note that they are integer values (in  the  original
> 	norms the equivalent range was 1.00 to 7.00).
> 
> While probably rated by first year psych studentsi rather than 8 year
> olds, it's a good bet that familiarity is related to age appropriateness.
> An old professor of mine has a somewhat larger list from the same era
> using 1st year psych students from southern Indiana.  I still have a copy
> of it on tape, though I'm not sure he would be happy if I released it.
> If somebody has access to PsychLit or other similar citation database
> (CARL Uncover?), a quick search may turn up references to age appropriate
> word lists directly.
> 

How can we use this?  What are the licensing issues with it, etc?

Can you contact your old professor and get permission?

Having it already populated databases would jumpstart several of our
projects ;)

Jeff Waddell
jeff@smluc.org

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