MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

Abstract

Using the megastudy approach, we report a new database (MEGALEX) of visual and auditory lexical decision times and accuracy rates for tens of thousands of words. We collected visual lexical decision data for 28,466 French words and the same number of pseudowords, and auditory lexical decision data for 17,876 French words and the same number of pseudowords (synthesized tokens were used for the auditory modality). This constitutes the first large-scale database for auditory lexical decision, and the first database to enable a direct comparison of word recognition in different modalities. Different regression analyses were conducted to illustrate potential ways to exploit this megastudy database. First, we compared the proportions of variance accounted for by five word frequency measures. Second, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the relative importance of the lexical variables influencing performance in the different modalities (visual and auditory). Finally, we compared the similarities and differences between the two modalities. All data are freely available on our website ( https://sedufau.shinyapps.io/megalex/ ) and are searchable at www.lexique.org , inside the Open Lexique search engine.

The Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database

“…Recently, Ferrand et al (2017) produced the MEGALEX database. This database investigates comprehension of French and contains data from both the visual and auditory modalities, with a specific focus on comparing comprehension in the two modalities.…”

“…Although both visual and auditory word processing literatures are longstanding and developed (e.g., visual: Forster (1976), Coltheart et al (1977), Forster et al (2003), and Balota et al (2006); auditory: (Jusezyk & Luce, 2002;Smits et al, 2003;Cutler, 2012)), there is surprisingly little direct comparison of the two modalities. There may be a great deal of shared architecture in the systems involved in both types of recognition (Bradley & Forster, 1987), but (Taft, 1986), (Goh et al, 2016) and (Ferrand et al, 2017) are the only behavioral studies we were able to uncover which compare the two modalities directly (though see Chee et al (1999) and Rayner and Clifton (2009), for neuroimaging studies). Large visual databases have existed for some time, and now with the addition of MALD, these auditory/visual comparisons are quite accessible.…”

Semantic similarity and associated abstractness norms for 630 French word pairs

“…The concreteness variable corresponds to the mean concreteness for the prime word and target word separately as ratings were obtained on individual words for concreteness and on pairs of words for semantic similarity. provide the means for associated lexical variables computed by crossing our dataset with the Lexique (New et al, 2004), FLP (Ferrand et al, 2010), MEGALEX (Ferrand et al, 2018) and…”

“…We have added a measure of the concreteness of each word from each pair to allow for the selection of abstract concepts in line with Crutch and Jackson's (2011) suggestion that there is a relationship between graded levels of concreteness and semantic organisation. To provide a dataset of experimental stimuli according to the significant lexical variables and lexical latencies previously discussed, we have combined our list of words with existing databases such as the French Lexicon Project (FLP, Ferrand et al, 2010), Lexique (New et al, 2001(New et al, , 2004(New et al, , 2007, MEGALEX (Ferrand et al, 2018), and Wordlex (Gimenes & New, 2016).…”

Modeling the length effect for words in lexical decision: The role of visual attention

“…In measuring LD reaction times (RT) for a large sample of words of different lengths, megastudies helped understand these apparent inconsistencies. Indeed, it appears that the effect of word length is not linear: reaction times are constant for words between 5 to 8 letters, but they increase with length for words longer than 8 letters (Ferrand et al, 2010(Ferrand et al, , 2011(Ferrand et al, , 2017New et al, 2006).…”