Psychologists and linguists collect various data on word and concept properties. In psychology, scholars have accumulated norms and ratings for a large number of words in languages with many speakers. In linguistics, scholars have accumulated cross-linguistic information about the relations between words and concepts. Until now, however, there have been no efforts to combine information from the two fields, which would allow comparison of psychological and linguistic properties across different languages. The Database of Cross-Linguistic Norms, Ratings, and Relations for Words and Concepts (NoRaRe) is the first attempt to close this gap. Building on a reference catalog that offers standardization of concepts used in historical and typological language comparison, it integrates data from psychology and linguistics, collected from 98 data sets, covering 65 unique properties for 40 languages. The database is curated with the help of manual, automated, semi-automated workflows and uses a software API to control and access the data. The database is accessible via a web application, the software API, or using scripting languages. In this study, we present how the database is structured, how it can be extended, and how we control the quality of the data curation process. To illustrate its application, we present three case studies that test the validity of our approach, the accuracy of our workflows, and the integrative potential of the database. Due to regular version updates, the NoRaRe database has the potential to advance research in psychology and linguistics by offering researchers an integrated perspective on both fields.

In tonal languages, the role of intonation in information-structuring has yet to be fully investigated. Intuitively, one would expect intonation to play only a small role in expressing communicative functions. However, experimental studies with Vietnamese native speakers show that intonation contours vary across different contexts and are used to mark certain types of information, for example, focus (Jannedy, 2007). In non-tonal languages (e.g., English), the marking of focus by intonation can influence the processing of focus alternatives (Fraundorf, Watson, & Benjamin, 2010). If Vietnamese also uses intonation to mark focus, the question arises whether the behavioral consequences of prosodic focus marking in Vietnamese are comparable to languages such as English or German. To test this, we replicate a study on memory for focus alternatives, originally carried out in German (Koch & Spalek, in progress), with Vietnamese language stimuli. In the original study, memory for focus alternatives was improved in a delayed recall task for focused elements produced with contrastive intonation in female speakers. Here, we replicate this finding with Northern Vietnamese native speakers: Contrastive intonation seems to improve later recall for focus alternatives in Northern Vietnamese, but only for female participants, in line with the findings by Koch and Spalek (in progress). These results indicate that prosodic focus marking in Vietnamese makes alternatives to the focused element more salient.

No abstract