E-Hitz: A word frequency list and a program for deriving psycholinguistic statistics in an agglutinative language (Basque)

Abstract

Agglutinative languages (i.e., languages in which words are formed by joining morphemes together; e.g., Hungarian, Turkish, Basque) are an excellent testing ground for psycholinguistic research in some of the key issues in lexical access. At present, there are several useful databases for computing a number of relevant psycholinguistic statistics in nonagglutinative languages (for English, see Coltheart, 1981;Davis, 2005; for French, see New, Pallier, Brysbaert, & Ferrand, 2004; for Spanish, see Davis & Perea, 2005), but none for those in agglutinative languages. Here, we present both a word frequency list (for word forms and lemmas) and an application for computing a wide variety of psycholinguistic statistics (so that relevant variables can be manipulated and/or controlled) in an agglutinative language that is of special interest to researchers in psycholinguistics: Basque.Basque is a pre-Indo-European language-with no demonstrable genetic relationship to any other living language-that is spoken at the western end of the Pyrenees, close to the Spanish-French border. Basque (Euskara in Basque) holds co-official language status (together with Spanish) in the Basque Autonomous Community and in some parts of Navarre. It is spoken by more than 700,000 people. Research in Basque is of special interest not just because of its very long history (its origins are unknown), but also because of its distinctive morphology and syntax.The interest of Basque for morphological studies is based on the fact that Basque is an agglutinative language and, as such, has a high proportion of inflected words (e.g., etxe [house] [homeowner]). Indeed, compound words are often formed by several lexemes (e.g., the Basque word for "argument"[eztabaida] can be decomposed as ez-da-bai-da, which literally means "It is, it isn't"). The interest of Basque for syntax studies is due to the fact that Basque has not only rich inflectional morphology but also overt case markers, including up to three agreement markers on the inflected verb (marking subject, object, and dative agreement; e.g., daramazkiot ["I'm carrying (now) these (pl.) We describe a Windows program that enables users to obtain a broad range of statistics concerning the properties of word and nonword stimuli in an agglutinative language (Basque), including measures of word frequency (at the whole-word and lemma levels), bigram and biphone frequency, orthographic similarity, orthographic and phonological structure, and syllable-based measures. It is designed for use by researchers in psycholinguistics, particularly those concerned with recognition of isolated words and morphology. In addition to providing standard orthographic and phonological neighborhood measures, the program can be used to obtain information about other forms of orthographic similarity, such as transposed-letter similarity and embedded-word similarity. It is available free of charge from www .uv.es/mperea/E-Hitz.zip.

Modeling accuracy as a function of response time with the generalized linear mixed effects model

“…The 'apertium' translation database (Tyers, Sánchez-Martínez, Ortiz-Rojas, & Forcada, 2010) was used to define an initial set of Basque-Spanish noun translations. Next, using the citation-form phonological transcription in lexical databases for Spanish ('B-Pal', Davis & Perea, 2005) and Basque ('E-Hitz', Perea et al, 2006), pairs of nouns were chosen such that: the members of each pair had the same number of syllables but distinct initial phonemes, the Levenshtein distance between the CV transcriptions of each pair was less than three, the Levenshtein distance between the phonological transcriptions was greater than three (to avoid cognates), the absolute difference in log 10 frequency was less than 2, both the Spanish and Basque frequencies-per-million were greater than 5, both the Spanish and the Basque words had a noun part-of-speech tag, and that the absolute difference in the number of phonemes was not greater than 1. Note that the lexical databases for Spanish and Basque are compiled from written sources.…”

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

“…Standalone software packages are also available for Spanish and other languages that provide subsets of the properties in EsPal (Davis, 2005;Davis & Perea, 2005;New, Pallier, Brysbaert, & Ferrand, 2004;Perea et al, 2006). However, given the size of the corpora (discussed below), some of the calculations for some of the properties take up to a week on a standard PC, so a precomputed set of properties is preferred.…”

Lexical organization of language-ambiguous and language-specific words in bilinguals

“…Such a result would demonstrate that orthographic markedness modulates bilingual lexical access, suggesting that lexical-orthographic representations of words from two languages that share basic sub-lexical orthographic distributional information are stored closer in lexical semantic memory than representations of words with highly distinctive language-selective orthotactics. Perea et al, 2006). We used the length-corrected orthographic Levenshtein distance in order to restrict the cross-linguistic similarity between these words and their Spanish translation equivalents.…”

“…Further research should explore not only the way in which sub-lexically marked and unmarked words are represented in the bilingual and from the LEXESP database (Sebastián-Gallés et al, 2000) for Spanish. Bigram Frequency corresponds to the logarithmic transformation of bigram frequencies dependent of word length and position taken from E-Hitz database (Perea et al, 2006) and B-Pal (Davis & Perea, 2005). Asterisks indicate significant statistical differences between Marked and Unmarked conditions.…”