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SCOPE: The South Carolina psycholinguistic metabase

Behavior Research Methods (2022)Cite this article

Abstract

The number of databases that provide various measurements of lexical properties for psycholinguistic research has increased rapidly in recent years. The proliferation of lexical variables, and the multitude of associated databases, makes the choice, comparison, and standardization of these variables in psycholinguistic research increasingly difficult. Here, we introduce The South Carolina Psycholinguistic Metabase (SCOPE), which is a metabase (or a meta-database) containing an extensive, curated collection of psycholinguistic variable values from major databases. The metabase currently contains 245 lexical variables, organized into seven major categories: General (e.g., frequency), Orthographic (e.g., bigram frequency), Phonological (e.g., phonological uniqueness point), Orth-Phon (e.g., consistency), Semantic (e.g., concreteness), Morphological (e.g., number of morphemes), and Response variables (e.g., lexical decision latency). We hope that SCOPE will become a valuable resource for researchers in psycholinguistics and affiliated disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience of language, computational linguistics, and communication disorders. The availability and ease of use of the metabase with comprehensive set of variables can facilitate the understanding of the unique contribution of each of the variables to word processing, and that of interactions between variables, as well as new insights and development of improved models and theories of word processing. It can also help standardize practice in psycholinguistics. We demonstrate use of the metabase by measuring relationships between variables in multiple ways and testing their individual contribution towards a number of dependent measures, in the most comprehensive analysis of this kind to date. The metabase is freely available at go.sc.edu/scope.

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Data availability

The data for the present study can be accessed at go.sc.edu/scope.

Code availability

The code for the present study can be accessed at https://osf.io/9qbjz/.

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Acknowledgements

In addition to the authors of publicly available datasets, we thank Marc Brysbaert, Chee Qian Wen, and Michael Vitevitch for sharing data.

Funding

This work was supported by NIH/NIDCD grants R01DC017162, R01DC017162-02S1, and R56DC010783 (RHD), and a Radboud Excellence fellowship from Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands (CG).

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  1. Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands

    Chuanji Gao

  2. Department of Psychology, Institute for Mind and Brain, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, 29201, USA

    Svetlana V. Shinkareva & Rutvik H. Desai

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  1. Chuanji Gao
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Correspondence to Svetlana V. Shinkareva or Rutvik H. Desai.

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The data for the present study can be accessed at go.sc.edu/scope. The code for the present study can be accessed at https://osf.io/9qbjz/.

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Gao, C., Shinkareva, S.V. & Desai, R.H. SCOPE: The South Carolina psycholinguistic metabase. Behav Res (2022). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01934-0

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Keywords

  • Psycholinguistic
  • Database
  • Lexical characteristics
  • Word recognition