TAADA: Tool for the Automatic analysis of Decoding Ability

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TAADA is an NLP tool specifically designed to annotate and count lexical and sub-lexical features related to decoding in English. The features include metrics for grapheme, phoneme, and syllable counts, word frequency, contextual diversity, neighborhood effects, rhymes, and conditional probability.
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TAADA takes plain text files (files with .txt as the extension) as input. It will process all plain text files in a particular folder and produces a comma separated values (.csv) spreadsheet that is easily read by any spreadsheet software.

Steps for running TAADA are as follows

1. Open TAADA. Note that on Mac OS (and perhaps other OS) it will say the software is from an unknown developer. Mac users must choose Apple menu  -> System Settings, then click Privacy & Security  in the sidebar (you may need to scroll down). Next,  Go to Security, then click Open and then Click Open Anyway.
2. Choose files in the TAADA interface (see below).
3. Choose level of analysis where you can select all words or content words and lemmatized words or original words.
4. Choose tests in which you are interested. These include basic decoding counts, conditional probability metrics, neighborhood effects (from the English Lexicon Project), word frequency (from COCA), and rhyme counts from PerDICT.
5. Enter the name of the .csv file you want to write.
​6. Run the tests.

Please use the following citations when referencing TAADA:

Citation forthcoming!!

Most Recent Compiled Version: TAADA 1.1 (released 6-15-2025)
TAADA 1.1 Index Description Spreadsheet

TAADA 1.1 for Mac
​TAADA 1.1 for Windows 

*NOTE
If a notification pops up saying "Windows protected your PC", click on "More info" and then "Run Anyway" to bypass the pop up and run the app.
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Studies that have used TAADA

Coming soon! Try it out and let us know.

QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS, OR SUGGESTIONS?

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