The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan
The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan
Pauline Schröter 0
Sascha Schroeder 0
0 MPRG Reading Education and Development (REaD), Max Planck Institute for Human Development , Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin , Germany
With the Developmental Lexicon Project (DeveL), we present a large-scale study that was conducted to collect data on visual word recognition in German across the lifespan. A total of 800 children from Grades 1 to 6, as well as two groups of younger and older adults, participated in the study and completed a lexical decision and a naming task. We provide a database for 1,152 German words, comprising behavioral data from seven different stages of reading development, along with sublexical and lexical characteristics for all stimuli. The present article describes our motivation for this project, explains the methods we used to collect the data, and reports analyses on the reliability of our results. In addition, we explored developmental changes in three marker effects in psycholinguistic research: word length, word frequency, and orthographic similarity. The database is available online. There is an extensive body of research on the visual word recognition processes in skilled adults (e.g., Balota et al., 2007). On the basis of this research, several computational models have been developed that account for many of the benchmark effects observed in word processing tasks such
Visual word recognition; Development; Mega studies; Lexical decision; Naming
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* Sascha Schroeder
as lexical decision (LD) or naming (e.g., Coltheart, Rastle,
Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Harm & Seidenberg,
2004; Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2007). Most of these models,
however, only aim at explaining the reading behavior of
proficient adults who have already acquired the ability to read. In
recent years, some efforts have been made to bring
interindividual differences into the picture (Andrews & Lo, 2012;
Adelman, Sabatos-DeVito, Marquis, & Estes, 2014;
Kuperman & van Dyke, 2013; Yap, Balota, Sibley, &
Ratcliff, 2012). Arguably, however, the most pronounced
differences between readers are intra-individual in nature:
Children are not born with the ability to read but need years
of extensive practice in order to learn it. And even during
adulthood, profound changes take place in lexical and
sublexical processing (Balota, Cortese, Sergent-Marshall,
Spieler, & Yap, 2004; Ratcliff, Perea, Colangelo, &
Buchanan, 2004). Yet, developmental models of the visual
word recognition process are still rather scarce (but see
Pritchard, Coltheart, Marinus, & Castles, 2016; Ziegler,
Bertrand, Lété, & Grainger, 2014). One of the main reasons
for this is that very few studies have been conducted that
investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan within
a coherent framework. Thus, at present, the empirical data that
are necessary to feed any computational modeling efforts are
missing.
The present article describes the Developmental Lexicon
Project (DeveL), which provides a linguistic database for
1,152 German words including behavioral measures of how
they are processed at different age groups across the lifespan.
Extending the logic and methodology of existing mega studies
on visual word recognition (Balota et al., 2007; Balota, Yap,
Hutchison, & Cortese, 2012; Ferrand et al., 2010; Keuleers,
Diependaele, & Brysbaert, 2010; Keuleers, Lacey, Rastle, &
Brysbaert, 2012; Yap, Liow, Jalil, & Faizal, 2010), we
collected visual word-processing data in different age groups using
an LD and a naming task. The resulting database
(https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/max-planckresearch-groups/mprg-read) will hopefully help researchers to
advance theories and computational models of visual word
recognition that include a developmental perspective. In
addition, it will provide a valuable resource for virtual
e x p e r i m e n t s o n a l a r g e r a n g e o f t o p i c s w i t h i n
psycholinguistic research. Apart from the development of
linguistic marker effects on the lexical level, topics that
could be addressed include sublexical processing, and the
role of morphology, phonology, and semantics.
In this article, we describe how the data have been collected
and processed, discuss which linguistic measures are available
in the database, and investigate some methodological issues
that are relevant in a developmental context. In addition, we
will provide some preliminary results how three important
marker effects in psycholinguistic research (word length,
word frequency, and neighborhood size) change across the
lifespan.
Background and motivation
In recent years, several databases have been generated that are
specifically tailored for psycholinguistic needs. Lexicon
projects collecting behavioral data for thousands of words have
been conducted in English (Balota et al., 2007), French
(Ferrand et al., 2010), Dutch (Keuleers, Diependaele, &
Brysbaert, 2010), Malay (...truncated)