CLEARPOND: cross-linguistic easy-access resource for phonological and orthographic neighborhood densities

Past research has demonstrated cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and task-dependent differences in neighborhood density effects, indicating a need to control for neighborhood variables when developing and interpreting research on language processing. The goals of the present paper are two-fold: (1) to...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2012-08, Vol.7 (8), p.e43230-e43230
Main Authors: Marian, Viorica, Bartolotti, James, Chabal, Sarah, Shook, Anthony
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition & reasoning
Computer Science
Cross-modal
Data bases
Downloading
Dutch language
Engineering
French language
German language
Grapheme phoneme correspondence
Humans
Language
Language processing
Linguistics
Linguistics - methods
Natural language processing
Neighborhood
Neighborhoods
Orthography
Phonemes
Phonetics
Phonological similarity
Research methodology
Researchers
Residential density
Social and Behavioral Sciences
Spanish language
Studies
Vocabulary
Vocabulary development
Word frequency
Word lists
Word meaning
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Past research has demonstrated cross-linguistic, cross-modal, and task-dependent differences in neighborhood density effects, indicating a need to control for neighborhood variables when developing and interpreting research on language processing. The goals of the present paper are two-fold: (1) to introduce CLEARPOND (Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities), a centralized database of phonological and orthographic neighborhood information, both within and between languages, for five commonly-studied languages: Dutch, English, French, German, and Spanish; and (2) to show how CLEARPOND can be used to compare general properties of phonological and orthographic neighborhoods across languages. CLEARPOND allows researchers to input a word or list of words and obtain phonological and orthographic neighbors, neighborhood densities, mean neighborhood frequencies, word lengths by number of phonemes and graphemes, and spoken-word frequencies. Neighbors can be defined by substitution, deletion, and/or addition, and the database can be queried separately along each metric or summed across all three. Neighborhood values can be obtained both within and across languages, and outputs can optionally be restricted to neighbors of higher frequency. To enable researchers to more quickly and easily develop stimuli, CLEARPOND can also be searched by features, generating lists of words that meet precise criteria, such as a specific range of neighborhood sizes, lexical frequencies, and/or word lengths. CLEARPOND is freely-available to researchers and the public as a searchable, online database and for download at http://clearpond.northwestern.edu.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0043230