UniPseudo: A universal pseudoword generator.

Pseudowords are letter strings that look like words but are not words. They are used in psycholinguistic research, particularly in tasks such as lexical decision. In this context, it is essential that the pseudowords respect the orthographic statistics of the target language.

The Lexical Association Technique: A randomized controlled trial with breast cancer patients.

Low self-esteem is a vulnerability factor for depressive disorders, and the prevention of psychological disorders is essential in cancer patients. The enhancement of self-esteem in breast cancer patients may therefore be an appropriate clinical target. Previous studies have shown the efficacy of the Lexical Association Technique to enhance self-esteem in healthy subjects.

How Should Self-Esteem Be Considered in Cancer Patients?

Numerous studies showed that cancer significantly increases the risk of developing depressive and anxious symptoms. It has been shown that self-esteem is an important psychological resource and is associated with many health behaviors. Furthermore, the vulnerability model of low self-esteem, which has received strong empirical support, highlights that low self-esteem is a real risk factor in the development of depressive disorders.

Lexique-Infra: grapheme-phoneme, phoneme-grapheme regularity, consistency, and other sublexical statistics for 137,717 polysyllabic French words.

Psycholinguistic research has shown that both the regularity and consistency of the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondences impact word processing. Lexique-Infra is a new database providing infra-lexical statistics for 137,717 French words. The frequencies of the grapheme-phoneme and phoneme-grapheme correspondences as well as other indicators (consistency, regularity, letter frequencies, bigrams, trigrams, phonemes, biphones, and syllables, etc.

The black superiority effect: Black is taller than gray.

A novel illusion entitled "the letter height superiority effect" has been demonstrated. This shows that letters are perceived as being taller than pseudoletters, while in reality their objective sizes are identical. An explanation of this illusion has been proposed in the framework of the Interactive Activation Model.

The emergence of automaticity in reading: Effects of orthographic depth and word decoding ability on an adjusted Stroop measure.

How long does it take for word reading to become automatic? Does the appearance and development of automaticity differ as a function of orthographic depth (e.g., French vs.

MEGALEX: A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition.

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.

MultiPic: A standardized set of 750 drawings with norms for six European languages.

Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited.

The processing of singular and plural nouns in English, French, and Dutch: New insights from megastudies.

In this study, we explored the processing of singular and plural word forms, using megastudies in French, English, and Dutch. For singulars, we observed a base frequency effect but no surface frequency effect. For plurals, the effect depended on the frequency of the word form.

The letter height superiority illusion.

Letters are identified better when they are embedded within words rather than within pseudowords, a phenomenon known as the word superiority effect (Reicher in Journal of Experimental Psychology, 81, 275-280, 1969). This effect is, inter alia, accounted for by the interactive-activation model (McClelland & Rumelhart in Psychological Review, 88, 375-407, 1981) through feedback from word to letter nodes. In this study, we investigated whether overactivation of features could lead to perceptual bias, wherein letters would be perceived as being taller than pseudoletters, or words would be perceived as being taller than pseudowords.

Worldlex: Twitter and blog word frequencies for 66 languages.

Lexical frequency is one of the strongest predictors of word processing time. The frequencies are often calculated from book-based corpora, or more recently from subtitle-based corpora. We present new frequencies based on Twitter, blog posts, or newspapers for 66 languages.

Diphones-fr: a French database of diphone positional frequency.

The aim of this article is to describe a database of diphone positional frequencies in French. More specifically, we provide frequencies for word-initial, word-internal, and word-final diphones of all words extracted from a subtitle corpus of 50 million words that come from movie and TV series dialogue. We also provide intra- and intersyllable diphone frequencies, as well as interword diphone frequencies.

Adding part-of-speech information to the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies.

The SUBTLEX-US corpus has been parsed with the CLAWS tagger, so that researchers have information about the possible word classes (parts-of-speech, or PoSs) of the entries. Five new columns have been added to the SUBTLEX-US word frequency list: the dominant (most frequent) PoS for the entry, the frequency of the dominant PoS, the frequency of the dominant PoS relative to the entry's total frequency, all PoSs observed for the entry, and the respective frequencies of these PoSs. Because the current definition of lemma frequency does not seem to provide word recognition researchers with useful information (as illustrated by a comparison of the lemma frequencies and the word form frequencies from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), we have not provided a column with this variable.

Comparing word processing times in naming, lexical decision, and progressive demasking: evidence from chronolex.

We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482). We compare the tasks and also examine the impact of word length, word frequency, initial phoneme, orthographic and phonological distance to neighbors, age-of-acquisition, and subjective frequency. Our results show that objective word frequency is by far the most important variable to predict reaction times in LD.

On letter frequency effects.

In four experiments we examined whether the frequency of occurrence of letters affects performance in the alphabetic decision task (speeded letter vs. pseudo-letter classification). Experiments 1A and 1B tested isolated letters and pseudo-letters presented at fixation, and Experiments 2A and 2B tested the same stimuli inserted at the 1st, 3rd, or 5th position in a string of Xs.

Assessing the usefulness of google books' word frequencies for psycholinguistic research on word processing.

In this Perspective Article we assess the usefulness of Google's new word frequencies for word recognition research (lexical decision and word naming). We find that, despite the massive corpus on which the Google estimates are based (131 billion words from books published in the United States alone), the Google American English frequencies explain 11% less of the variance in the lexical decision times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) than the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies, based on a corpus of 51 million words from film and television subtitles.

SUBTLEX-NL: a new measure for Dutch word frequency based on film subtitles.

We present a new database of Dutch word frequencies based on film and television subtitles, and we validate it with a lexical decision study involving 14,000 monosyllabic and disyllabic Dutch words. The new SUBTLEX frequencies explain up to 10% more variance in accuracies and reaction times (RTs) of the lexical decision task than the existing CELEX word frequency norms, which are based largely on edited texts. As is the case for English, an accessibility measure based on contextual diversity explains more of the variance in accuracy and RT than does the raw frequency of occurrence counts.

The French Lexicon Project: lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and 38,840 pseudowords.

The French Lexicon Project involved the collection of lexical decision data for 38,840 French words and the same number of nonwords. It was directly inspired by the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) and produced very comparable frequency and word length effects.

Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: a critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English.

Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms.

On-line contextual influences during reading normal text: The role of nouns, verbs and adjectives.

In a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on the French part of the Dundee corpus, the time spent inspecting a target word in a given sentence was found to depend on its degree of semantic relatedness (as assessed in the LSA framework) to two content words belonging to a prior part of the sentence, and located at varying distances to the left of the target. However, only verb primes were found to elicit a significant influence when located in the more remote position. In addition, the influence elicited by remote primes was modulated as a function of their position in the constituent structure, relative to the position of the target.

Differential processing of consonants and vowels in lexical access through reading.

Do consonants and vowels have the same importance during reading? Recently, it has been proposed that consonants play a more important role than vowels for language acquisition and adult speech processing. This proposal has started receiving developmental support from studies showing that infants are better at processing specific consonantal than vocalic information while learning new words. This proposal also received support from adult speech processing.

Age-of-acquisition and subjective frequency estimates for all generally known monosyllabic French words and their relation with other psycholinguistic variables.

Ratings for age of acquisition (AoA) and subjective frequency were collected for the 1,493 monosyllabic French words that were most known to French students. AoA ratings were collected by asking participants to estimate in years the age at which they learned each word. Subjective frequency ratings were collected on a 7-point scale, ranging from never encountered to encountered several times daily.

On-line contextual influences during reading normal text: a multiple-regression analysis.

On-line contextual influences during reading were examined in a series of multiple-regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eye-movement data, using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to assess the degree of contextual constraints exerted on a given target word by the immediately prior word and by the prior sentence fragment. A decrease in inspection time was observed as contextual constraints increased. Word-level constraints exerted their influence both forward (on both single-fixation and gaze durations) and backward (on gaze duration only).

Reexamining the word length effect in visual word recognition: new evidence from the English Lexicon Project.

In the present study, we reexamined the effect of word length (number of letters in a word) on lexical decision. Using the English Lexicon Project, which is based on a large data set of over 40,481 words (Balota et al., 2002), we performed simultaneous multiple regression analyses on a selection of 33,006 English words (ranging from 3 to 13 letters in length).