MANULEX: a grade-level lexical database from French elementary school readers.

This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods described by Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duvvuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency; D, index of dispersion across the selected readers; U, estimated frequency per million words; and SFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists.     

MANULEX: A grade-level lexical database from French elementary school readers

This article presents MANULEX, a Web-accessible database that provides grade-level word frequency lists of nonlemmatized and lemmatized words (48,886 and 23,812 entries, respectively) computed from the 1.9 million words taken from 54 French elementary school readers. Word frequencies are provided for four levels: first grade (G1), second grade (G2), third to fifth grades (G3-5), and all grades (G1-5). The frequencies were computed following the methods describedby Carroll, Davies, and Richman (1971) and Zeno, Ivenz, Millard, and Duwuri (1995), with four statistics at each level (F, overall word frequency;D, index of dispersion across the selectedreaders;U, estimated frequencyper million words; andSFI, standard frequency index). The database also provides the number of letters in the word and syntactic category information. MANULEX is intended to be a useful tool for studying language development through the selection of stimuli based on precise frequency norms. Researchers in artificial intelligence can also use it as a source of information on natural language processing to simulate written language acquisition in children. Finally, it may serve an educational purpose by providing basic vocabulary lists.     

Lexique 2: a new French lexical database.

In this article, we present a new lexical database for French: Lexique. In addition to classical word information such as gender, number, and grammatical category, Lexique includes a series of interesting new characteristics. First, word frequencies are based on two cues: a contemporary corpus of texts and the number of Web pages containing the word. Second, the database is split into a graphemic table with all the relevant frequencies, a table structured around lemmas (particularly interesting for the study of the inflectional family), and a table about surface frequency cues. Third, Lexique is distributed under a GNU-like license, allowing people to contribute to it. Finally, a metasearch engine, Open Lexique, has been developed so that new databases can be added very easily to the existing ones. Lexique can either be downloaded or interrogated freely from http://www.lexique.org.     

Children’s emotional norms for 600 French words

The present study provides a French child database containing a large corpus of words (N=600) that were rated on emotional valence (positive, neutral, and negative) by French children differing in both age (5, 7, and 9 years old) and sex (girls and boys). Good response reliability was observed in each of the three age groups. The results showed some age differences in the children’s ratings. With increasing age, the percentage of words rated positive decreased, whereas the percentage of neutral words increased and the percentage of negative words remained stable. Our study did not reveal marked differences across sex groups. The database compiled here should become a useful tool for experimental studies in which verbal material is used with children. It would be worthwhile in future research to study how children process emotional words and also to control the emotional variable in the same way as other linguistic variables in the experimental design. The norms from this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Interactions among affect, cognition, and visuomotor coordination as measured in words and symbols

The associative frequencies of responses to stimulus words during free and controlled forced-choice word-association tests correlate well with each other and with assessments of the affective character (emotional content) of the stimulus words for the test subjects (Osgood Index) for three samples of volunteer French undergraduate students (ns = 200, 64, and 72). These indices correlate negatively with the subjects' performance on Digit Symbol Substitution tests. Neisser's theory of schemata and Edelman's theory of neuronal group selection may provide insight into this relationship. If the associative frequency of a subject's response decreased, the affective content of the word stimulus (as perceived by the subject) diminished as well. This relationship was associated with a relatively higher score on Digit Symbol Substitution. Conversely, it was observed that subjects whose responses were characterized by high associative frequencies (whether the response was spontaneous or forced-choice) rated the stimulus words as having a relatively stronger affective content or emotional character and performed less well on Digit Symbol Substitution.     

Corroborating biased indicators: Global and local agreement among objective and subjective estimates of printed word frequency

The internal validity of several types of experiments in experimental psychology and neuroscience depends in part on the possibility of controlling or manipulating critical lexical variables such as word frequency of occurrence. Two ways of estimating this variable are (1) objective frequency counts and (2) subjective ratings of word frequency. Each method produces estimates that generally agree (i.e., they are highly correlated) but that disagree substantially concerning the relative frequency of a number of words. To investigate this issue more closely, the global and local agreement of subjective frequency estimates was examined in detail for a pool of 6,202 words drawn from the OMNILEX database of French words (Desrochers, 2006; www.omnilex.uottawa .ca). The results indicated that objective and subjective frequencies are strongly correlated, subjective frequencies share a significant amount of bias variance with other lexical characteristics (e.g., imageability), and the codeterminants of subjective frequency are in an antagonistic relationship with one another. The implications of these results for the selection of lexical stimuli are discussed, and multiple variables to aid in item selection are reported. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/ content/supplemental.     

SUBTLEX-NL: A new measure for Dutch word frequency based on film subtitles

We present a new database of Dutch word frequencies based on film and television subtitles, and we validate it with a lexical decision study involving 14,000 monosyllabic and disyllabic Dutch words. The new SUBTLEX frequencies explain up to 10% more variance in accuracies and reaction times (RTs) of the lexical decision task than the existing CELEX word frequency norms, which are based largely on edited texts. As is the case for English, an accessibility measure based on contextual diversity explains more of the variance in accuracy and RT than does the raw frequency of occurrence counts. The database is freely available for research purposes and may be downloaded from the authors’ university site at http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-nl or from http://brm psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.     

Terror in time: extending culturomics to address basic terror management mechanisms

Building on Google's efforts to scan millions of books, this article introduces methodology using a database of annual word frequencies of the 40,000 most frequently occurring words in the American literature between 1800 and 2009. The current paper uses this methodology to replicate and identify terror management processes in historical context. Variation in frequencies of word usage of constructs relevant to terror management theory (e.g. death, worldview, self-esteem, relationships) are investigated over a time period of 209 years. Study 1 corroborated previous TMT findings and demonstrated that word use of constructs related to death and of constructs related to patriotism and romantic relationships significantly co-vary over time. Study 2 showed that the use of the word “death” most strongly co-varies over time with the use of medical constructs, but also co-varies with the use of constructs related to violence, relationships, religion, positive sentiment, and negative sentiment. Study 3 found that a change in the use of death related words is associated with an increase in the use of fear related words, but not in anxiety related words. Results indicate that the described methodology generates valuable insights regarding terror management theory and provide new perspectives for theoretical advances.     

Lexique 2 : A new French lexical database

In this article, we present a new lexical database for French:Lexique. In addition to classical word information such as gender, number, and grammatical category,Lexique includes a series of interesting new characteristics. First, word frequencies are based on two cues: a contemporary corpus of texts and the number of Web pages containing the word. Second, the database is split into a graphemic table with all the relevant frequencies, a table structured around lemmas (particularly interesting for the study of the inflectional family), and a table about surface frequency cues. Third,Lexique is distributed under a GNU-like license, allowing people to contribute to it. Finally, a metasearch engine,Open Lexique, has been developed so that new databases can be added very easily to the existing ones.Lexique can either be downloaded or interrogated freely fromhttp://www.lexique.org.     

French norms of imagery for pictures, for concrete and abstract words]

This paper deals with French norms for mental image versus picture agreement for 138 pictures and the imagery value for 138 concrete words and 69 abstract words. The pictures were selected from Snodgrass et Vanderwart's norms (1980). The concrete words correspond to the dominant naming response to the pictorial stimuli. The abstract words were taken from verbal associative norms published by Ferrand (2001). The norms were established according to two variables: 1) mental image vs. picture agreement, and 2) imagery value of words. Three other variables were controlled: 1) picture naming agreement; 2) familiarity of objects referred to in the pictures and the concrete words, and 3) subjective verbal frequency of words. The originality of this work is to provide French imagery norms for the three kinds of stimuli usually compared in research on dual coding. Moreover, these studies focus on figurative and verbal stimuli variations in visual imagery processes.     

Norme francophone de complétion de trigrammes chez des participants âgés de 30 à 93 ans

This paper provides normative data for a 102-item word-stem completion task. Participants are scattered into four age groups (30/40, 40/50, 50/60, 60/70 years and 70 and more). They were asked to complete a series of word-stems by adding two letters to produce a maximum of French words of five letters long. The final database presents various indicators of completion as a function of age and word-stem polarity. In addition, normative data for each age group are included in order to compare each participant’s performance to the score obtained by a sample of the same age. This database should help researchers to construct experimental material by considering altogether, firstly, the production in French language compared to subjective production frequency and secondly, the intergroup and intragroup variability.     

ONESC: A database of orthographic neighbors for Spanish read by children

In this article, we present a database of orthographic neighbors for words that Spanish children read during elementary education. The reference dictionary for lexical entries and frequencies (which had its origin in Martínez & García, 2004) comprises approximately 100,000 words and is the result of accumulating the words read by a sample of children from first to sixth grades. Using the criterion for orthographic neighbors described by Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, and Besner (1977), we present basic statistics related to neighborhood size as a function of the positions of divergent letters, the cumulative frequency of the neighbors, and the numbers of neighbors of higher, lower, and equal frequency. We also attempt to illustrate and unravel the nature of the relationships among the variables neighborhood size, length, and frequency in the distribution of neighbors. The database described in this article is available at www.psychonomic.org/archive.     

Children's early reading vocabulary: Description and word frequency lists

Background: When constructing stimuli for experimental investigations of cognitive processes in early reading development, researchers have to rely on adult or American children's word frequency counts, as no such counts exist for English children. Aim: The present paper introduces a database of children's early reading vocabulary, for use by researchers and teachers. Sample: Texts from 685 books from reading schemes and story books read by 5‐7 year‐old children were used in the construction of the database. Method: All words from the 685 books were typed or scanned into an Oracle database. Results: The resulting up‐to‐date word frequency list of early print exposure in the UK is available in two forms from a website address given in this paper. This allows access to one list of the words ordered alphabetically and one list of the words ordered by frequency. We also briefly address some fundamental issues underlying early reading vocabulary (e.g., that it is heavily skewed towards low frequencies). Other characteristics of the vocabulary are then discussed. Conclusions: We hope the word frequency lists will be of use to researchers seeking to control word frequency, and to teachers interested in the vocabulary to which young children are exposed in their reading material.     

Word frequency as a cue for identifying function words in infancy

While content words (e.g., ‘dog’) tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., ‘the’) mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language–universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded sentences in a foreign language (i.e., in French). In these sentences, two determiners appeared much more frequently than any content word. Following this, infants were presented with a visual object, and simultaneously with a word pair composed of a determiner and a noun. Results showed that infants associated the object more strongly with the infrequent noun than with the frequent determiner. That is, when presented with both the old object and a novel object, infants were more likely to orient towards the old object when hearing a label with a new determiner and the old noun compared to a label with a new noun and the old determiner. In Experiment 2, infants were tested using the same procedure as in Experiment 1, but without the initial exposure to French sentences. Under these conditions, infants did not preferentially associate the object with nouns, suggesting that the preferential association between nouns and objects does not result from specific acoustic or phonological properties. In line with various biases and heuristics involved in acquiring content words, we provide the first direct evidence that infants can use distributional cues, especially the high frequency of occurrence, to identify potential function words.     

Transitional probabilities and positional frequency phonotactics in a hierarchical model of speech segmentation

The present study explored the influence of a new metrics of phonotactics on adults’ use of transitional probabilities to segment artificial languages. We exposed French native adults to continuous streams of trisyllabic nonsense words. High-frequency words had either high or low congruence with French phonotactics, in the sense that their syllables had either high or low positional frequency in French trisyllabic words. At test, participants heard low-frequency words and part-words, which differed in their transitional probabilities (high for words, low for part-words) but were matched for frequency and phonotactic congruency. Participants’ preference for words over part-words was found only in the high-congruence languages. These results establish that subtle phonotactic manipulations can influence adults’ use of transitional probabilities to segment speech and unambiguously demonstrate that this prior knowledge interferes directly with segmentation processes, in addition to affecting subsequent lexical decisions. Implications for a hierarchical theory of segmentation cues are discussed.     

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/.     

Foreign language knowledge can influence native language performance in exclusively native contexts

In three experiments, we studied the influence of foreign language knowledge on native language performance in an exclusively native language context. Trilinguals with Dutch as their native and dominant language (L1), English as their second language (L2), and French as their third language (L3) performed a word association task (Experiment 1) or a lexical decision task (Experiments 2 and 3) in L1. The L1 stimulus words were cognates with their translations in English, cognates with their translations in French, or were noncognates. In Experiments 1 and 2 with trilinguals who were highly proficient in English and relatively low in proficiency in French, we observed shorter word association and lexical decision times to the L1 words that were cognates with English than to the noncognates. In these relatively low-proficiency French speakers, response times (RTs) for the L1 words that were cognates with French did not differ from those for the noncognates. In Experiment 3, we tested Dutch-English- French trilinguals with a higher level of fluency in French (i.e., equally fluent in English and in French). We now observed faster responses on the L1 words that were cognates with French than on the noncognates. Lexical decision times to the cognates with English were also shorter than those to the noncognates. The results indicate that words presented in the dominant language, to naive participants, activate information in the nontarget, and weaker, language in parallel, implying that the multilinguals’ processing system is profoundly nonselective with respect to language. A minimal level of nontarget language fluency seems to be required, however, before any weaker language effects become noticeable in L1 processing.     

Imagerie visuelle et rappel moteur d'enchaînements : effet du bilinguisme français vs créole

The two experiments reported in the present paper concern (i) the differential imagery value of French and Creole and (ii) the influence of language on the recall of sequences of patterned movements in a bilingual population. Creole words were obtained a higher imagery value than French words, certainly because Creole is an oral and vernacular language. Motor recall scores were better when the sequence was presented in Creole compared to French. The generation of visual images by Creole would facilitate the memorization and recall of new sequences of movements. The effect of language on imagery value of words and motor recall among bilingual French-Creole subjects was discussed in terms of nature of information encoding in each language.