Wordbank: An Open Repository for Developmental Vocabulary Data

学习语言是人类最令人印象深刻和耐人寻味的成就之一。早期的语言技能为后来的认知发展和学术成就奠定了基础。该项目的目标是为对典型和非典型语言发展感兴趣的研究人员开发一个强大的工具，以更好地理解幼儿最早的语言。这个名为Wordbank的工具是一个关于儿童词汇的父母报告的结构化数据库，其中结合了数以万计的报告，这些报告是由其子女参与儿童发展研究的父母完成的。词库将包括来自数十个国家的研究实验室的数据，这些数据是多年来收集的，包括世界上的许多语言。这个数据库将有助于了解各种语言和文化的概括性趋势，以及探索儿童个体在语言发展方面可能存在差异的原因。如此丰富的信息来源将使人们能够获得在较小样本中无法发现的新见解。Wordbank将使用麦克阿瑟-贝茨沟通发展量表(CDI)，这是一个广泛使用的家长报告工具家族，旨在轻松而廉价地收集有关儿童早期语言习得的数据。WordBank将把跨语言和实验室的CDI数据归档为逐个项目格式的关系数据库。该网站建立在开源分析工具的基础上，将提供深入的探索性可视化，并促进数据的生产性重复使用。除了用于探索的交互界面外，该网站还将允许研究人员直接连接到底层数据库。其结果将是一种资源，使人们能够在各种学科中发现早期语言。

Learning language is one of the most impressive and intriguing human accomplishments. Early language skills set the stage for later cognitive development and academic achievement. The goal of this project is to develop a powerful tool for researchers interested in typical and atypical language development to better understand young children's earliest language. This tool, called Wordbank, is a structured database of parent reports about children's vocabulary that combines tens of thousands of reports completed by parents whose children have participated in child development research. Wordbank will include data from research laboratories in dozens of countries, collected over many years and including many of the world's languages. This database will be useful for understanding generalizable trends across languages and cultures as well as exploring reasons that individual children might differ in their language development. Such a rich source of information will allow for novel insights that could not be discovered in smaller samples. Wordbank will make use of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDIs), a widely-used family of parent-report instruments that are designed for easy and inexpensive data-gathering about children's early language acquisition. Wordbank will archive CDI data across languages and labs in an item-by-child format relational database. Built on open-source analytic tools, the site will host in-depth exploratory visualizations and facilitate the productive reuse of data. In addition to an interactive interface for exploration, the website will also allow researchers to connect directly to the underlying database. The result will be a resource that enables new discoveries about early language across a variety of disciplines.