childLex

childLex is a linguistic corpus comprising 500 German children's books intended to be read between ages 6 to 12. The project has been conducted within the Max Planck Research Group REaD together with colleagues from the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences (Kay-Michael Würzner, Alexander Geyken) and the University of Potsdam (Julian Heister, Reinhold Kliegl).

A English paper that has appeared in Behavior Research Methods and describes the corpus in more detail can be found here:

• Schroeder, S., Würzner, K.-M., Heister, J., Geyken, A., & Kliegl, R. (2015). childLex: A lexical database of German read by children. Behavior Research Methods, 47, 1085-1094. doi:10.3758/s13428-014-0528-1

A German paper that provides some further analyses can be found here:

• Schroeder, S., Würzner, K.-M., Heister, J., Geyken, A., & Kliegl, R. (2015). childLex: Eine lexikalische Datenbank zur Schriftsprache für Kinder im Deutschen. Psychologische Rundschau, 66, 155-165. doi:10.1026/0033-3042/a000275

The current version of the corpus is 0.17.1 (Jan 2019). An Excel file (27 MB) with various linguistic variables for a cleaned version of the corpus can be downloaded here:

• childLex (0.17.01c)

All variables are further described in the legend of the Excel file.

DeveL: Developmental Lexicon Project

Within the Developmental Lexicon Project we investigated how visual word recognition changes across the lifespan. In order to do this, we administered a set of ~ 1200 words to children at various stages of reading acquisition (grades 1-6) as well as younger (25-35 years) and older (65-75 years) adults. All participants performed both in a naming and lexical decision task.

A paper that has appeared in Behavior Research Methods describes the overall aims and the methodological details of the project:

• Schröter, P., & Schroeder, S. (2017). The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan. Behavior Research Methods, 49, 2183-2203. doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0851-9

The results for all words and nonwords in all age groups (together with a set of relevant item characteristics) can be found as .RData files here (use load() for import):

• DeveL word data
• DeveL nonword data

A full description of the data files can be found in the paper provided above.

Measures of Print Exposure

In the last couple of years at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development we spent some time to adapt different measures to assess print exposure (or reading volume) in different age groups.

These tools include:

• an auditory title recognition test for preschool children (3-6 years)
• a title recognition test for primary school children (6-12 years)
• an author recognition test for adolescents and adults that can be used over the complete lifespan (13-80 years).

All instruments can be freely used or adapted. An OSF project providing all necessary materials and some background publications can be found here.