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Article published In:
Orthographic Databases and Lexicons
Edited by Lynne Cahill and Terry Joyce
[Written Language & Literacy 20:1] 2017
► pp. 6–26

Orthographic and phonological neighborhood databases across multiple languages

| Northwestern University

The increased globalization of science and technology and the growing number of bilinguals and multilinguals in the world have made research with multiple languages a mainstay for scholars who study human function and especially those who focus on language, cognition, and the brain. Such research can benefit from large-scale databases and online resources that describe and measure lexical, phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. The present paper discusses currently-available resources and underscores the need for tools that enable measurements both within and across multiple languages. A general review of language databases is followed by a targeted introduction to databases of orthographic and phonological neighborhoods. A specific focus on CLEARPOND illustrates how databases can be used to assess and compare neighborhood information across languages, to develop research materials, and to provide insight into broad questions about language. As an example of how using large-scale databases can answer questions about language, a closer look at neighborhood effects on lexical access reveals that not only orthographic, but also phonological neighborhoods can influence visual lexical access both within and across languages. We conclude that capitalizing upon large-scale linguistic databases can advance, refine, and accelerate scientific discoveries about the human linguistic capacity.

Keywords: databases, orthographic neighborhoods, phonological neighborhoods, cross-linguistic, CLEARPOND, neighborhood frequency, neighborhood density, language, psycholinguistics
Article outline
  • 1.Overview of linguistic databases
  • 2.Introduction to neighborhood databases
  • 3.The cross-linguistic easy access resource for phonological and orthographic neighborhood densities
  • 4.Using neighborhood databases in research
  • 5.A closer look at neighborhood effects in lexical decision
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 19 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/wll.20.1.02mar
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