Acknowledgements

Newcastle University

The app would not have been possible without a funded sabbatical provided by Newcastle University. I have also been encouraged and supported to use the app with successive generations of Speech and Language Therapy students, and this has helped to further refine the app. In particular I would like to thank Carol Moxam for her wisdom and encouragement, Janet Webster for supporting the roll out of the app with the students, and finally the students, for being willing and delightful guinea pigs.

Github

The app has been hosted on Github, which is owned by Microsoft. Github generously channels some of its profits for supporting free and open source software, and the hosting of non-profit websites.

Open source frameworks

The app is designed with a range of open source technologies. It is programmed in R (R Core Team (2025). R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria. https://www.R-project.org/.), and exploits the Shiny App framework for designing web apps (Chang W, Cheng J, Allaire J, Sievert C, Schloerke B, Xie Y, Allen J, McPherson J, Dipert A, Borges B (2024). shiny: Web Application Framework for R. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.shiny https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.shiny, R package version 1.10.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=shiny). As such, it is a testament to the power and flexibility of open source software.

The Posit Foundation

The Posit Foundation is a non-profit foundation which supports the R infrastructure, and develops the RStudio and Positron apps which are used to analyse R data.

In particular, I would like to thank George Stagg for developing the webR / shinylive framework which has been used to run the app (Stagg, G. W., Lionel, H., & Others. (2023). webR: The statistical language R compiled to WebAssembly via Emscripten (Version 0.2.2) [Computer software]. https://github.com/r-wasm/webr, Schloerke B, Chang W, Stagg G, Aden-Buie G (2024). shinylive: Run ‘shiny’ Applications in the Browser. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.shinylive https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.shinylive, R package version 0.3.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=shinylive.). The webR / shinylive framework is instrumental to the rollout of this app as it has enabled me to share the app widely without incurring costs for running and / or maintaining a server. George also kindly helped to host the MiMo app for a number of years at Newcastle.

I should also acknowledge the amazing Quarto scientific publishing platform which has been used to create these help pages. It’s an fantastic tool which we should all be using, both for scientific publication, and for pedagogical purposes.

Talkbank / CHILDES

Talkbank / CHILDES is a platform which hosts the CLAN language analysis app, and a large number of data sets from both clinical and non-clinical populations. The norms which are used in MiMo are derived from CHILDES. In particular, I used the childesR app to bulk download child language data (Braginsky M, Sanchez A, Yurovsky D (2022). childesr: Accessing the ‘CHILDES’ Database. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.childesr https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.childesr, R package version 0.2.3, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=childesr). It also provides the KIDEVAL norms which can be accessed in the Norms app, a carefully selected corpus of highly-reliable data.

Universal Dependencies Framework

This is multinational project has been partly supported by Google, in addition to funding from European Research Councils (grant GX20-16819X of the Czech Science Foundation awarded to Daniel Zeman and grant 2016-01817 of the Swedish Research Council Joakim Nivre). The Universal Dependencies are used to part-of-speech tag the linguistic data.

Other R Packages

Xie Y, Cheng J, Tan X (2024). DT: A Wrapper of the JavaScript Library ‘DataTables’. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.DT https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.DT, R package version 0.33, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=DT.

Wickham H, François R, Henry L, Müller K, Vaughan D (2023). dplyr: A Grammar of Data Manipulation. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.dplyr https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.dplyr, R package version 1.1.4, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=dplyr.

Wickham H (2025). stringr: Simple, Consistent Wrappers for Common String Operations. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.stringr https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.stringr, R package version 1.5.2, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=stringr.

Wijffels J (2023). udpipe: Tokenization, Parts of Speech Tagging, Lemmatization and Dependency Parsing with the ‘UDPipe’ ‘NLP’ Toolkit. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.udpipe https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.udpipe, R package version 0.8.11, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=udpipe.

Hornik K, Rauch J, Buchta C, Feinerer I (2024). textcat: N-Gram Based Text Categorization. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.textcat https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.textcat, R package version 1.0-9, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=textcat.

Zeileis A, Grothendieck G (2005). “zoo: S3 Infrastructure for Regular and Irregular Time Series.” Journal of Statistical Software, 14(6), 1-27. doi:10.18637/jss.v014.i06 https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v014.i06.

Michalke, M. (2021). koRpus: Text Analysis with Emphasis on POS Tagging, Readability, and Lexical Diversity (Version 0.13-8). Available from https://reaktanz.de/?c=hacking&s=koRpus

Attali D (2023). colourpicker: A Colour Picker Tool for Shiny and for Selecting Colours in Plots. doi:10.32614/CRAN.package.colourpicker https://doi.org/10.32614/CRAN.package.colourpicker, R package version 1.3.0, https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=colourpicker.

ChatGPT

In the interests of full disclosure I have used ChatGPT quite intensively in the final stages of developing the app. In particular I have used it to write javascript routines, and it has also been super-helpful for getting the app to run via webR / web assembly.