R script to determine word complexity version 2.1
Run the script locally in R/Rstudio. Text input should be in .txt files and include orthographic transcriptions (e.g. gloss or ordinary typed English) of words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.
A Shiny app is also available at https://github.com/unccard/woRdcomplex-2.1 or https://unccard.shinyapps.io/shiny-woRdcomplex-2/.
Word Complexity Measure (WCM) is calculated as described in Stoel-Gammon (2010), based on lookup from a database including standard syllabified transcriptions for American English (cmudict.0.6d.syl; Bartlett et al., 2009) and word frequency measures from the SUBTLEX-US dictionary (Brysbaert & New, 2009). Word frequencies are displayed in Zipf units (van Heuven et al 2014), a logarithmic scale defined as log10(word frequency in words per billion), with distribution from approximately 1 (very low frequency) to 7 (high frequency function words, articles, etc.).
An applied example of this work is found at the following link: https://go.unc.edu/j6JRz
Jacks, A., Richardson, J.D., Greene, L.G., & Haley, K.L. (2022, February). Phonetic word complexity in narratives produced by people with AOS of varying etiology. Poster presented at: 21st Biennial Conference on Motor Speech, 2022 February; Charleston, SC.
References:
Bartlett, S., Kondrak, G., & Cherry, C. (2009, June). On the syllabification of phonemes. In Proceedings of human language technologies: The 2009 annual conference of the north american chapter of the association for computational linguistics (pp. 308-316).
Brysbaert, M., & New, B. (2009). Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior research methods, 41(4), 977-990.
Stoel-Gammon, C. (2010). The Word Complexity Measure: Description and application to developmental phonology and disorders. Clinical linguistics & phonetics, 24(4-5), 271-282.
Van Heuven, W. J., Mandera, P., Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2014). SUBTLEX-UK: A new and improved word frequency database for British English. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 67(6), 1176-1190.