SYLLABARIUM: An online application for deriving complete statistics for Basque and Spanish orthographic syllables

Abstract

For more than a decade, a large body of empirical evidence has shown that, for the recognition of a written word, subword units are accessed at early stages of visual word processing, and the properties of these subword units have an effect on reading behavior. Researchers have repeatedly reported data showing how letters and phonemes (e.g., Pelli, Farell, & Moore, 2003;Perea, Duñabeitia, & Carreiras, 2008b;Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006), syllables (e.g., Conrad, Stenneken, & Jacobs, 2006Perea & Carreiras, 1998), and morphemes (e.g., Duñabeitia, Perea, & Carreiras, 2007a, 2008Rastle, Davis, & New, 2004) constitute the building blocks of word processing. However, how polysyllabic words are segmented into their syllables during reading is still an open question, and further research is needed in order to shed some light on this issue. The present study reports the process of creating a database of Spanish and Basque syllables: SYLLABARIUM, a Web tool for psycholinguistic experiments that includes features for material selection and syllable analyses. Syllables As Processing UnitsMuch research has been done to explore the influence of the syllable in word processing, focusing on transparent languages like Spanish, in which orthographic representations (i.e., graphemes) map to phonological representations (i.e., phonemes) almost in a one-to-one manner (see Ál-varez, Carreiras, & Perea, 2004;Carreiras, Álvarez, & de Vega, 1993). Two findings have been repeatedly reported in the literature: the syllable-congruency priming effect (Carreiras & Perea, 2002) and the inhibitory effect of the first syllable's positional frequency (Carreiras et al., 1993).The term syllable-congruency priming effect refers to the fact that, when a word is preceded by a string containing the same orthographic or phonological syllable, this word is recognized faster and more accurately than when it is preceded by a string in which the initial syllable is not the same. Carreiras and Perea (2002) were the first authors to report a syllable-congruency priming effect, showing that a Spanish word like PASTOR (shepherd), syllabified as PAS.TOR, was recognized faster in a Spanish lexical decision task when it was preceded by a string like PAS *** than when it was preceded by a string like PA **** . In the same experiment, Carreiras and Perea also showed that a word like PASIVO ( passive), syllabified as PA.SI.VO, was recognized faster in the lexical decision task when it was preceded by the syllabic-congruent string PA ***** than The present article introduces SYLLABARIUM, a new Web tool addressing the needs of linguists, psycholinguists, and cognitive scientists who work with Spanish and/or Basque and are interested in retrieving information about several syllable-related parameters. This new online syllabic database allows the user to generate complete lists of Spanish and Basque syllables with information about the syllable frequency. Among other measures, for a given orthographic syllable, SYLLABARIUM provides its number of occurrences (i.e., the typ...

How do bilinguals identify the language of the words they read?

“…ERPs were quantified by taking the mean amplitude of each participant and electrode in two temporal epochs corresponding to the two primary components of interest found to be sensitive to masked language switch cost ERP effects: the N250 (covering a time window between 180 and 260 ms post-target onset) and the N400 (represented by a time window between 350 and 500 ms). These two epochs of interest are in accordance with those reported in earlier studies on a similar topic using a parallel procedure (e.g., Chauncey et al, 2008Chauncey et al, , 2011Dunabeitia et al, 2010b;Holcomb and Grainger, 2006;Hoshino et al, 2010;Midgley et al, 2009b). These two epochs were analyzed separately in two sets of repeated measures analyses of variance (ANOVAs).…”

“…The masked priming languageswitching paradigm combined with Event-Related Potential (ERP) recording is an extremely valuable approach for researchers exploring the time-course of language identification. Using such approach, it has been shown that bilinguals can automatically and unconsciously detect the language of a word within 200 milliseconds of stimulus onset (Chauncey et al, 2008(Chauncey et al, , 2011Dunabeitia et al, 2010b). In masked priming ERP studies exploring language detection, participants are typically presented with primes for 50 ms (i.e., below the threshold of conscious recognition) and unrelated targets that are in the same or different languages (e.g., casa-DOG vs.…”

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

“…The most similar effort is the Syllabarium (Duñabeitia, Cholin, Corral, Perea, & Carreiras, 2010), which is a Webbased tool accessing a database containing information on word frequencies and syllable frequencies by token and syllable position. 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).…”

The BEST Dataset of Language Proficiency

“…Besides, recent studies have also focused on Basque multilinguals in order to explore language-mediated domain-general cognitive processes such as attention (e.g., see Antón et al, 2014, 2016; Duñabeitia et al, 2014) or learning (e.g., Cenoz, 1998). Given this increased presence of studies with Basque multilinguals, some efforts have been made to provide researchers with databases that allow for the creation of adequately characterized research materials (e.g., Perea et al, 2006; Duñabeitia et al, 2010a; Acha et al, 2014). …”