One could easily argue that the most commonly studied stimulus set in experimental psychology involves English words. The study of the memory and reading of words has been central to research since Cattell (1886). Words are well-described units that provide the link between perception and meaning, and so have been critical to developments in computational modeling (e.g., McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), neuroimaging (e.g., Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1989, and conceptions of attention and automaticity (e.g., Neely, 1977;Stroop, 1935), among many other research areas.Given the importance of words as a stimulus set, one might assume that there are relatively straightforward ways to study lexical processing, and that there is a wellconstrained set of findings to which one can appeal in building models of word processing. Although there has been considerable progress in understanding how people process words, there are some clear gaps in the available literature. This paper describes the English Lexicon Project (ELP), which provides a behavioral database for over 40,000 words and nonwords that will help fill some of these gaps. The present description will focus on visual word recognition, although, as described below, the current database has relevance for other aspects of word processing, such as memory and speech production. Before describing the ELP, we will briefly describe the behavioral measures in the database, the limitations in our current knowledge, and how this database will help address these limitations. LEXICAL DECISIONS AND NAMING AS THE BEHAVIORAL TARGETSAlthough there are multiple ways to measure lexical processing (e.g., eye-fixation data, probability of iden- The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.

The links between spellings and sounds in a large set of English words with consonant-vowel-consonant phonological structure were examined. orthographic rimes, or units consisting of a vowel grapheme and a final consonant grapheme, had more stable pronunciations than either individual vowels or initial consonant-plus-vowel units. In 2 large-scale studies of word pronunciation, the consistency of pronunciation of the orthographic rime accounted for variance in latencies and errors beyond that contributed by the consistency of pronunciation of the individual graphemes and by other factors. In 3 experiments, as well, children and adults made more errors on words with less consistently pronounced orthographic rimes than on words with more consistently pronounced orthographic rimes. Relations between spellings and sounds in the simple monomorphemic words of English are more predictable when the level of onsets and rimes is taken into account than when only graphemes and phonemes are considered.

Three experiments were carried out to examine the development of knowledge about double letters. Children and adults chose items they thought looked most word-like from pairs of nonwords. First graders chose nonwords with final doublets (e.g., baff) and allowable doublets (e.g., yilt) as more word-like than nonwords with initial doublets (e.g., bbaf) or unallowable doublets (eg., yihh). Children in late kindergarten chose final-doublet nonwords (e.g., pess) more often than initial-doublet nonwords (e.g., ppes), but performed at chance when choosing between items such a&jull andyufct The same children in 1 st grade chose jull more often than jiikk even though their own spellings were semiphonetic and phonetic according to stage theories of spelling development. Only participants in the 6th grade and above knew the correspondence between a medial doublet and a preceding short vowel (e.g., tebbif). The results suggest that even young writers know about simple orthographic patterns.Most recent work on children's spelling has viewed spelling as an attempt to represent the sounds of words (e.g.,

No abstract

No abstract