GreekLex 2: A comprehensive lexical database with part-of-speech, syllabic, phonological, and stress information

• Published in: PloS one 2017-02, Vol.12 (2), p.e0172493-e0172493
• Main Authors: Kyparissiadis, Antonios, van Heuven, Walter J B, Pitchford, Nicola J, Ledgeway, Timothy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Analysis; Biology and Life Sciences; Brain research; Data bases; Databases, Factual; Dictionaries; Grammatical categories; Greece; Greek language; Humans; Information sources; Language; Length (Phonological); Lexical phonology; Methods; Natural language processing; Orthography; Phonetic transcription; Phonetics; Phonology; Physical Sciences; Psycholinguistics; Psycholinguistics - methods; Psychology; Reading; Social Sciences; Speech; Statistics; Stress; Stress analysis; Stress concentration; Stress distribution; Studies; Subtitles & subtitling; Syllabification; Transcription; Vocabulary
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172493

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several metrics to investigate linguistic properties of the Greek language are highlighted. To address these issues, we present a new extensive lexical database of Modern Greek (GreekLex 2) with part-of-speech information for each word and accurate syllabification and orthographic information predictive of stress, as well as several measurements of word similarity and phonetic information. The addition of detailed statistical information about Greek part-of-speech, syllabification, and stress neighbourhood allowed novel analyses of stress distribution within different grammatical categories and syllabic lengths to be carried out. Results showed that the statistical preponderance of stress position on the pre-final syllable that is reported for Greek language is dependent upon grammatical category. Additionally, analyses showed that a proportion higher than 90% of the tokens in the database would be stressed correctly solely by relying on stress neighbourhood information. The database and the scripts for orthographic and phonological syllabification as well as phonetic transcription are available at http://www.psychology.nottingham.ac.uk/greeklex/.