EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

Abstract

This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http:// www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/. Keywords Word frequency . Subtitles . Word recognition . Corpus linguistics . PsycholinguisticsResearchers from a wide range of disciplines (e.g., neuroscience, artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, and education, among others) who work in the interdisciplinary area of language research (e.g., language acquisition, language processing, language learning, bilingualism, and computational linguistics) need quick and efficient access to information about specific properties of words. For example, word frequency is a dominant factor in accounting for visual word recognition speed as measured by lexical decision times (Forster & Chambers, 1973;Monsell, 1991) and eye fixation durations during reading (Rayner, 2009). Unsurprisingly, reading behavior as measured by, for example, lexical decision, naming, fixation times, and so on is affected by a wide range of other properties of words, including orthographic neighborhood

Does Having Good Articulatory Skills Lead to More Fluent Speech in First and Second Languages?

“…To conclude, having good articulatory skills may lead to more fluent speech in the L1 and L2, at least with respect to pausing, but not to slower or faster articulation rate in semi-spontaneous speech. NOTES 1.The lexical properties of the Spanish words were obtained from the EsPal subtitle tokens database (Duchon, Perea, Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, & Carreiras, 2013), whereas those of the English words were obtained from the SUBTL Word Frequency database (Brysbaert & New, 2009).…”

Phonological and orthographic coding in deaf skilled readers

“…For the word trials, 80 Spanish words between eight and ten letters long were selected (mean log word frequency: 3.88, range: 3.45-4.48; mean number of letters: 8.73; Duchon et al, 2013). For the nonword trials, 80 Spanish base words between eight and ten letters long with a similar frequency to the first set were also selected (mean log word frequency: 3.91, range: 2.97-5.12; mean number of letters: 8.74).…”

“…For word trials, 80 Spanish words between four and six letters long were selected (mean log word frequency in the EsPal database (Duchon, Perea, Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, & Carreiras, 2013): 3.57, range: 3.01-3.87; mean number of letters: 5). For nonword trials, 80 Spanish base words between four and six letters long with a similar frequency to the first set were also selected (mean log word frequency: 3.96, range: 2.61-4.65; mean number of letters: 5.29).…”

Non-cognate translation priming effects in the same–different task: evidence for the impact of “higher level” information

“…The frequency of the English targets varied between 1.8 and 866.04 per million (M = 107.56; subtitle frequency in the Brysbaert & New, 2009, count), their number of orthographic neighbours (Coltheart's NColtheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977) ranged from 0 to 23 (M = 4.85) and the mean concreteness of the English words was 5.64 (range 3.05-6.70 on a 1-7 scale; Coltheart, 1981). The Spanish primes ranged from 3 to 9 letters in length (M = 5.26), their written subtitle frequency ranged from 0.10 to 1445.31 per million (M = 107.50), their number of orthographic neighbours ranged from 0 to 25 (M = 4.47) and their concreteness indices ranged from 2.48 to 6.77 (M = 5.39) based on the EsPal Spanish Database (Duchon, Perea, Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, & Carreiras, 2013). These Spanish-English translation pairs and their respective unrelated primes are listed in Appendix 1.…”