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The Persian Lexicon Project: minimized orthographic neighbourhood effects in a dense language

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Abstract

In recent years large datasets of lexical processing times have been released for several languages, including English, French, Spanish, and Dutch. Such datasets have enabled us to study, compare, and model the global effects of many psycholinguistic measures such as word frequency, orthographic neighborhood (ON) size, and word length. We have compiled and publicly released a frequency and ON dictionary of 64,546 words and 1800 plausible NWs from a language that has been relatively little studied by psycholinguists: Persian. We have also collected visual lexical decision reaction times for 1800 Persian words and nonwords. Persian offers an interesting psycholinguistic environment for several reasons, including that it has few long words and has resultantly dense orthographic neighborhoods. These characteristics provide us with an opportunity to contrast how these factors affect lexical access by comparing them to several other languages. The results suggest that sensitivity to word length and orthographic neighbourhood may reflect the statistical structure of a particular language, rather than being a universal element of lexical processing. The dictionary and LDRT data are available from https://osf.io/tb4m6/.

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Data availability

The data and materials for all experiments are available at https://osf.io/tb4m6/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Humanities, Persian Gulf University, 7516913817, Bushehr, Iran

    Fatemeh Nemati

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, P217 Biological Sciences Building, T6G 2E9, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Chris Westbury

  3. Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta, 3-35 Athabasca Hall, CanadaT6G 2E8, Edmonton, AB, Canada

    Geoff Hollis

  4. Department of Statistics, Faculty of Intelligent Systems, Engineering and Data Sciences, Persian Gulf University, 7516913817, Bushehr, Iran

    Hossein Haghbin

Authors
  1. Fatemeh Nemati
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  2. Chris Westbury
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  3. Geoff Hollis
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  4. Hossein Haghbin
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Contributions

FM co-designed the experiment, collected the data, and co-wrote the manuscript. CW co-designed the experiment, analyzed the data, and co-wrote the manuscript. GH & HH provided technical assistance in collecting and analyzing the Persian corpora.

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Correspondence to Fatemeh Nemati.

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The authors have no competing interests or conflicts of interest.

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This work was conducted in accord with a memorandum of understanding on Educational, Research and Technological Cooperation between the Faculty of Humanities at Persian Gulf University and the Department of Psychology at the University of Alberta, under the ethical oversight at Persian Gulf University. Participation in the study was voluntary. All participants gave informed consent to participate after having the experiment explained and being informed that their individual data would remain anonymous.

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Nemati, F., Westbury, C., Hollis, G. et al. The Persian Lexicon Project: minimized orthographic neighbourhood effects in a dense language. J Psycholinguist Res 51, 957–979 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-022-09863-x

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