The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan

Behavior Research Methods, Jan 2017

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.

A PDF file should load here. If you do not see its contents the file may be temporarily unavailable at the journal website or you do not have a PDF plug-in installed and enabled in your browser.

Alternatively, you can download the file locally and open with any standalone PDF reader:

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2Fs13428-016-0851-9.pdf

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 - * 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)


This is a preview of a remote PDF: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.3758%2Fs13428-016-0851-9.pdf

Pauline Schröter, Sascha Schroeder. The Developmental Lexicon Project: A behavioral database to investigate visual word recognition across the lifespan, Behavior Research Methods, 2017, pp. 1-21, DOI: 10.3758/s13428-016-0851-9