Abstract
The English Lexicon Project is a multiuniversity effort to provide a standardized behavioral and descriptive data set for 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords. It is available via the Internet at elexicon.wustl.edu. Data from 816 participants across six universities were collected in a lexical decision task (approximately 3400 responses per participant), and data from 444 participants were collected in a speeded naming task (approximately 2500 responses per participant). The present paper describes the motivation for this project, the methods used to collect the data, and the search engine that affords access to the behavioral measures and descriptive lexical statistics for these stimuli.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Andrews, S. (1997). The effect of orthographic similarity on lexical retrieval: Resolving neighborhood conflicts.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,4, 439–461.
Ans, B., Carbonnel, S., &Valdois, S. (1998). A connectionist multitrace memory model of polysyllabic word reading.Psychological Review,105, 678–723.
Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., &van Rijn, H. (1993).The CELEX lexical database. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.
Balota, D. A., &Chumbley, J. I. (1984). Are lexical decisions a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,10, 340–357.
Balota, D. A., &Chumbley, J. I. (1985). The locus of word-frequency effects in the pronunciation task: Lexical access and/or production?Journal of Memory & Language,24, 89–106.
Balota, D. A., Cortese, M. J., Sergent-Marshall, S. D., Spieler, D. H., &Yap, M. J. (2004). Visual word recognition of single-syllable words.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,133, 283–316.
Balota, D. A., &Spieler, D. H. (1998). The utility of item-level analyses in model evaluation: A reply to Seidenberg and Plaut.Psychological Science,9, 238–240.
Besner, D., & Bourassa, D. C. (1995, June).Localist and parallel processing models of visual word recognition: A few more words. Paper presented at the Brain Behavior, and Cognitive Science Society, Halifax, CA.
Cattell, J. M. (1886). The time it takes to see and name objects.Mind,11, 63–65.
Centre for Speech Technology Research, University of Edinburgh. (n.d.).Unisyn lexicon [Data file]. Retrieved July 19, 2004, from www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/unisyn/.
Chateau, D., &Jared, D. (2003). Spelling-sound consistency effects in disyllabic word naming.Journal of Memory & Language,48, 255–280.
Coltheart, M., Davelaar, E., Jonasson, J., &Besner, D. (1977). Access to the internal lexicon. In S. Dornic (Ed.),Attention and performance VI (pp. 535–555). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., &Ziegler, J. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud.Psychological Review,108, 204–256.
Cutler, A. (1981). Making up materials is a confounded nuisance, or: Will we be able to run any psycholinguistic experiments at all in 1990?Cognition,10, 65–70.
Faust, M. E., Balota, D. A., Spieler, D. H., &Ferraro, F. R. (1999). Individual differences in information-processing rate and amount: Implications for group differences in response latency.Psychological Bulletin,125, 777–799.
Forster, K. I. (2000). The potential for experimenter bias effects in word recognition experiments.Memory & Cognition,28, 1109–1115.
Grainger, J., &Jacobs, A. M. (1996). Orthographic processing in visual word recognition: A multiple read-out model.Psychological Review,103, 518–565.
Horne, J. A., &Ostberg, O. (1976). A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness—eveningness in human circadian rhythms.International Journal of Chronobiology,4, 97–110.
Jared, D., McRae, K., &Seidenberg, M. S. (1990). The basis of consistency effects in word naming.Journal of Memory & Language,29, 687–715.
Keefe, D. E., &Neely, J. H. (1990). Semantic priming in the pronunciation task: The role of prospective prime-generated expectancies.Memory & Cognition,18, 289–298.
Kello, C. T. (2006). Considering the junction model of lexical processing. In S. Andrews (Ed.),From inkmarks to ideas: Current issues in lexical processing (pp. 50–75). New York: Psychology Press.
Kessler, B., Treiman, R., &Mullennix, J. (2002). Phonetic biases in voice key response time measurements.Journal of Memory & Language,47, 145–171.
Kučera, H., &Francis, W. (1967).Computational analysis of presentday American English. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.
Lund, K., &Burgess, C. (1996) Producing high-dimensional semantic spaces from lexical co-occurrence.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,28, 203–208.
McClelland, J. L., &Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1. An account of basic findings.Psychological Review,88, 375–407.
Neely, J. H. (1977). Semantic priming and retrieval from lexical memory: Roles of inhibitionless spreading activation and limited-capacity attention.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,106, 226–254.
Neely, J. H., Keefe, D. E., &Ross, K. L. (1989). Semantic priming in the lexical decision task: Roles of prospective prime-generated expectancies and retrospective semantic matching.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,15, 1003–1019.
New, B., Ferrand, L., Pallier, C., &Brysbaert, M. (2006). Reexamining word length effects in visual word recognition: New evidence from the English Lexicon Project.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,13, 45–52.
Petersen, S. E., Fox, P. T., Posner, M. I., Mintun, M., &Raichle, M. E. (1989). Positron emission tomographic studies of the processing of single words.Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience,1, 153–170.
Plaut, D. C., McClelland, J. L., Seidenberg, M. S., &Patterson, K. (1996). Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains.Psychological Review,103, 56–115.
Seidenberg, M. S., &McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed developmental model of word recognition and naming.Psychological Review,96, 523–568.
Seidenberg, M. S., & Waters, G. S. (1989, November).Naming words aloud: A mega-study. Paper presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Atlanta, GA.
Shipley, W. C. (1940). A self-administering scale for measuring intellectual impairment and deterioration.Journal of Psychology,9, 371–377.
Spieler, D. H., &Balota, D. A. (1997). Bringing computational models of word naming down to the item level.Psychological Science,8, 411–416.
Stroop, J. R. (1935). Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions.Journal of Experimental Psychology,18, 643–662.
Taraban, R., &McClelland, J. L. (1987). Conspiracy effects in word pronunciation.Journal of Memory & Language,26, 608–631.
Treiman, R., Mullennix, J., Bijeljac-Babic, R., &Richmond-Welty, E. D. (1995). The special role of rimes in the description, use, and acquisition of English orthography.Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,124, 107–136.
Zevin, J. D., &Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks.Journal of Memory & Language,47, 1–29.
Zorzi, M., Houghton, G., &Butterworth, B. (1998). Two routes or one in reading aloud? A connectionist dual-process model.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,24, 1131–1161.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by Grant AGO3991 from the Nation Institute on Aging and by Grant BCS 0001801 from the National Science Foundation
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Balota, D.A., Yap, M.J., Hutchison, K.A. et al. The English Lexicon Project. Behavior Research Methods 39, 445–459 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193014
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193014