Frequency & Distribution

Status: Current Last updated: 2026-03-30 13:40 EDT

Frequency and distribution commands count words, morphemes, and phonological segments in various ways. They answer questions like “what words appear most often?”, “how long are the words?”, and “which parts of speech dominate the transcript?”.

All commands in this chapter are available through the standard analysis workflow described in Running CLAN Commands.

FREQ – Word Frequency

What it does: Counts every word in the transcript and reports the frequency of each unique word form, organized by speaker.

Results include:

• Total word tokens (running words)
• Total word types (unique forms)
• Type-token ratio (TTR)
• Frequency table: each word with its count, sorted by frequency

FREQ is the most general-purpose counting command. It is the starting point for any lexical analysis.

Tip: Use the CSV export to load frequency lists into a spreadsheet for further analysis. Sort by frequency to find the most common words, or alphabetically to check for spelling variants.

FREQPOS – Frequency by Part of Speech

What it does: Counts word frequency broken down by part-of-speech categories from the %mor (morphology) tier.

Requires: A %mor tier. Files without morphological coding will produce empty results.

Results include:

• Frequency table with columns for word, POS tag, and count
• Summary counts per POS category (nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc.)

When to use it: When you need to know not just which words appear, but what grammatical roles they fill. For example, a child might have a large vocabulary but use very few verbs – FREQPOS reveals this.

WDLEN – Word Length Distribution

What it does: Reports the distribution of word lengths (measured in characters) across the transcript.

Results include:

• Histogram of word lengths (how many 1-character words, 2-character words, etc.)
• Mean word length per speaker
• Longest and shortest words

When to use it: For phonological or literacy research where word length is a variable of interest. Comparing word length distributions across sessions can reveal changes in lexical sophistication.

WDSIZE – Vocabulary Size

What it does: Reports the cumulative vocabulary size – the number of unique word types – as the transcript progresses. This produces a vocabulary growth curve.

Results include:

• Total vocabulary size per speaker
• Character length statistics from %mor stems

When to use it: For studying vocabulary growth over the course of a session or across sessions. The growth curve shows whether a speaker is still introducing new words or has plateaued.

MAXWD – Longest Words

What it does: Finds and lists the longest words produced by each speaker, measured in characters.

Results include:

• Longest words per speaker, with their lengths
• Context (the utterance in which each word appeared)

When to use it: As a quick check on lexical sophistication, or to spot transcription errors (unusually long “words” may be coding mistakes or missing spaces).

PHONFREQ – Phonological Frequency

What it does: Counts the frequency of phonological segments on the %pho (phonology) tier.

Requires: A %pho tier with IPA transcription.

Results include:

• Frequency of each phoneme
• Consonant vs. vowel breakdown
• Position-in-word analysis (initial, medial, final)

When to use it: For phonological research, speech sound disorder assessment, or studying sound acquisition patterns.

MODREP – Model and Replica

What it does: Analyzes imitation patterns by comparing a child’s utterance (the replica) to the preceding adult utterance (the model). Reports what was repeated exactly, what was modified, and what was added or omitted.

When to use it: For studying imitation and language learning strategies. High exact-imitation rates in older children may indicate echolalia; selective imitation patterns reveal what structures the child is actively acquiring.

COOCCUR – Co-occurrence

What it does: Counts how often pairs of words appear together in the same utterance.

Results include:

• Co-occurrence matrix or list of word pairs with counts
• Statistical association measures

When to use it: For studying lexical associations, collocations, and formulaic language. Useful in discourse analysis and vocabulary research.

DIST – Distribution

What it does: Analyzes the distribution and dispersion of specific words or codes across the transcript, showing where they cluster and where they are absent.

Results include:

• Distribution profile across utterance ranges
• Clustering and dispersion statistics

When to use it: For studying whether certain words or behaviors are evenly distributed or concentrated in particular portions of the interaction.

UNIQ – Unique Forms

What it does: Identifies repeated and unique utterances in the transcript. Finds exact duplicates and near-duplicates.

Results include:

• List of repeated utterances with their frequencies
• Unique utterances (appearing only once)

When to use it: For identifying stereotyped or formulaic language, echolalia, or transcription artifacts (accidental duplicate lines).

Working with frequency results

CSV export for spreadsheet analysis

All frequency commands support CSV export via the Export CSV button in the analysis panel. This is the recommended workflow for quantitative analysis:

1. Run FREQ (or another frequency command) on a file or directory.
2. Click Export CSV in the panel toolbar.
3. Open the CSV in your analysis tool of choice.

Combining with other commands

Frequency results are most informative when paired with profiling measures:

• Run FREQ to get raw counts, then VOCD to get a sample-size-corrected diversity measure. See Profiling Commands.
• Run FREQPOS to see POS distributions, then MLU to relate vocabulary composition to utterance length.
• Use FREQ on a directory to get corpus-wide word lists for normative comparison or stimuli selection.

Next steps

• Profiling Commands – MLU, MLT, VOCD, DSS, IPSyn
• Assessment Tools – KidEval, Eval, Eval-D
• Command Reference – all 33 commands in one table