The British Lexicon Project: Lexical decision data for 28,730 monosyllabic and disyllabic English words

Abstract

We present a new database of lexical decision times for English words and nonwords, for which two groups of British participants each responded to 14,365 monosyllabic and disyllabic words and the same number of nonwords for a total duration of 16 h (divided over multiple sessions). This database, called the British Lexicon Project (BLP), fills an important gap between the Dutch Lexicon Project (DLP; Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, Frontiers in Language Sciences. Psychology, 1, 174, 2010) and the English Lexicon Project (ELP; Balota et al., 2007), because it applies the repeated measures design of the DLP to the English language. The high correlation between the BLP and ELP data indicates that a high percentage of variance in lexical decision data sets is systematic variance, rather than noise, and that the results of megastudies are rather robust with respect to the selection and presentation of the stimuli. Because of its design, the BLP makes the same analyses possible as the DLP, offering researchers with a new interesting data set of word-processing times for mixed effects analyses and mathematical modeling. The BLP data are available at http://crr.ugent.be/blp and as Electronic Supplementary Materials.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-011-0118-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

How strongly do word reading times and lexical decision times correlate? Combining data from eye movement corpora and megastudies

“…This agrees with recent research showing the impact of this variable for the prediction of word processing times in megastudies (Baayen et al, 2006;Balota et al, 2004;Brysbaert et al, 2011;Ferrand et al, 2010;Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, 2010b;Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, in press). It also agrees with Murray and Forster's (2004, p. 721) assertion that: "Of all the possible stimulus variables that might control the time required to recognize a word pattern, it appears that by far the most potent is the frequency of occurrence of the pattern ...…”

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

“…To overcome these limitations, a number of large-scale psycholinguistic databases have been made available for languages with alphabetic orthographies, including English (Balota et al, 2007;Coltheart, 1981;Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012), French (Ferrand et al, 2010), Dutch (Keuleers, Diependaele, & Brysbaert, 2010), Italian (Barca, Burani, & Arduino, 2002), and Malay (Yap, Rickard Liow, Jalil, & Faizal, 2010). For example, in English, the MRC Database provides a set of word association norms, as well as syntactic information (Coltheart, 1981).…”

“…This database has been used in several regression analyses of naming and lexical decision tasks (Balota, Cortese, SergentMarshall, Spieler, & Yap, 2004;New, Ferrand, Pallier, & Brysbaert, 2006) and for evaluations of computational models (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007). Recently, the British Lexicon Project (BLP), developed by Keuleers et al (2012), has provided individual RTs for 28,739 English words. These standardized psycholinguistic norms not only provide a window to investigate how various lexical properties simultaneously affect visual word recognition, but also greatly reduce the time and effort spent preparing stimuli.…”

Norms of age of acquisition and concreteness for 30,000 Dutch words

“…As a result, researchers have collected word processing times for thousands of words in so-called lexicon projects. Thus far, this happened in American English (Balota et al, 2007), Dutch , Malay (Yap, Rickard Liow, Jalil, & Faizal, 2010), French (Ferrand et al, 2010), British English (Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, & Brysbaert, 2012), and Chinese (Sze, Rickard Liow, & Yap, in press).…”