![]() ![]() Let’s start with least happy, so we can end on a high note. ![]() ![]() In the middle of the pack you’ll find words like particularly, list, brown, expectations, equation, index, and explain.Īnd though the results aren’t altogether surprising, it’s intriguing to see words grouped by happiness this way. ![]() In the end, they had a huge list of words as ranked by happiness. Using the website Mechanical Turk, where anyone can sign up for odd jobs-many of them related to academic research-researchers asked people to rate the happiness quotient of the words they encountered. In this case, researchers at the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide enlisted the help of the crowd. That way, as the machine scanned passages from books, it could assess the emotional arc of the narrative.īut how do you decide how happy a word is? To prepare a machine to carry out a sentiment analysis, for instance, computer scientists had to assign a happiness index to 10,222 individual words. The overall research they did is fascinating ( I wrote about it in greater detail here), but several smaller components of the work are compelling in their own right. That’s what computer scientists found after teaching a machine to map the emotional arc of a huge corpus of literature. Parents can get access to books that are appropriate for their children at the local library.There are six main types of stories in fiction. Exposure to vocabulary is good for all kids. The words kids hear from books may have special importance in learning to read. “This isn’t about everyday communication,” Logan asserted, “The words kids hear in books are going to be much more complex, difficult words than they hear just talking to their parents and others in the home. Never read to, 4,662 words 1-2 times per week, 63,570 words 3-5 times per week, 169,520 words daily, 296,660 words and five books a day, 1,483,300 words. They found that board books contain an average of 140 words and picture books contain an average of 228 words.īased on further calculations based on how much the average parent interacts with and reads to their child, Logan and the researchers worked out how many words kids would have heard by the time they were 5 years old: They took 30 books from both lists from random and counted how many words were in each book. Logan and her team of researchers collaborated with the Columbus Metropolitan Library, identifying the 100 most circulated books for both board books (for infants and toddlers) and picture books (for preschoolers). We wanted to figure out what that might mean for their kids.” “The fact that we had so many parents who said they never or seldom read to their kids was pretty shocking to us. They are likely to pick up reading skills more quickly and easily.” “Kids who hear more vocabulary words are going to be better prepared to see those words in print when they enter school. Logan asserts that those who are read to even a little will find it easier learning to read by themselves: The stark difference between one five-year-old’s vocabulary and another is almost certainly down to how much they are read to at home. Jessica Logan, lead author of the study and assistant professor of educational studies at The Ohio State University, calls the discrepancy between children who are read to and those who aren’t “the million word gap”. ![]()
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