English podcasts for schoolchildren and their vocabulary demands

Abstract

This exploratory study examines the vocabulary demands of English children's podcasts. A 359,153-word podcast corpus was created using the written transcripts of episodes from these popular children's podcasts: But Why, Circle Round, KidNuz, Smash Boom Best, and Wow in the World. The corpus was analyzed to determine the vocabulary size necessary to know 95 % and 98 % of the words in the English children's podcasts. The results showed that a vocabulary size of the most 4,000-word families plus knowledge of proper nouns (PN), marginal words (MW), transparent compounds (TC) and acronyms (AC) provided 95.69 % coverage of the children's podcast corpus and a vocabulary size of 7,000-word families plus PN, MW, TC and AC reached 98.10 % coverage, indicating that podcasts designed for children require a larger vocabulary size compared to general-audience podcasts designed for adults.