About the BRAVE project

Hi there. My name is Grigory Golovin. I'm a physicist and a software engineer, and BRAVE (Brief Receptive Adaptive Vocabulary Evaluation) is my project. It grew out of a simple question: how many words do people actually know? To answer it, I built the first version back in 2014, and have spent the years since improving the algorithm, adding new languages, analyzing large datasets, collaborating with other researchers, and publishing papers. My goal is to provide a vocabulary assessment tool that is valid, accurate, efficient, and offers interpretable and insightful results. I want it to be useful for the general public, language teachers, and researchers alike.

Contributors

Over the years, many people have contributed to this project:

• Danil Fokin — BRAVE in Polish.
• Alex Terekhov — BRAVE in Modern Greek.
• Alexandra Shumakova — BRAVE in Hebrew.
• Илдар Әюпов — BRAVE in Tatar.
• Ekaterina Maslennikova — study on the relationship between vocabulary size and verbal intellect using the Russian version of BRAVE.
• Leonid Ashkenazi — several peer-reviewed and popular papers based on results from the Russian version of BRAVE.

Publications

Peer-reviewed papers

• Fokin, D., Plużyczka, M. & Golovin, G. The polish vocabulary size test: A novel adaptive test for receptive vocabulary assessment. Behav Res 57, 254 (2025)
• Л. Ашкинази, Г. Головин (2018) Исследование пассивного словарного запаса носителей русского языка посредством интернета, Вестник общественного мнения, 3-4(127)
• Е. Масленникова и др. (2017) Словарный запас как показатель вербального интеллекта, Вестник ЮУрГУ, 10(3)
• Г. Головин (2015) Измерение пассивного словарного запаса русского языка, Социо- и психолингвистические исследования, 3

Popular articles

• Л. Ашкинази, Г. Головин, Человек и его словарь, Химия и жизнь, Март 2019.
• Л. Ашкинази, "Сколько слов мы знаем", Знание-Сила, Сентябрь 2016.

BRAVE as a research tool

The BRAVE tests have been used in the following research:

• Larionova E.V. (2025). The role of orthographic knowledge, vocabulary size, and print exposure in orthographic processing during reading: Evidence from event-related potentials. I.P. Pavlov Journal of Higher Nervous Activity, 75(6), 721-735.
• Fokin, D. et al. (2025). The Depth Beyond the Lines: Piloting of the Psycholinguistic Test Battery for Polish Poetry Study. Literature, 5(4), 28.
• Parshina, O. et al. (2024). Predictive Language Processing in Russian Heritage Speakers: Task Effects on Morphosyntactic Prediction in Reading. Languages, 9(5), 158.
• Chernova, D., Bakhturina, P. (2024). Method of print exposure assessment: Application in psycholinguistics and adaptation for the Russian language. Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University, 20(4), 872–887.
• Likhanov, M. et al. (2022). This is the way: Network perspective on targets for spatial ability development programmes. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 1597–1620.
• Titov, S. et al. (2019). Full-scale Personality Prediction on VKontakte Social Network and its Applications. 25th FRUCT Conference, Helsinki.
• Esipenko, E. et al. (2018). Comparing Spatial Ability of Male and Female Students Completing Humanities vs. Technical Degrees. Psychology in Russia, 11(4), 37–49.
• Vasilevich, A.P. (2016). On Evaluating the Idiolect Vocabulary size. Journal of Psycholinguistics, 1(27), 71-75.

Let’s work together

If you are a researcher looking to include a robust vocabulary test in your test battery, an enthusiast interested in creating a test for your language, or simply someone with comments or suggestions, please feel free to reach out!

Contact me at gregorygolovin@gmail.com.

Grigory Golovin