Automating psycholinguistic statistics computation: procura palavras

This article describes psycholinguistic lexical databases
available in various languages, including English, Spanish and
Portuguese. These lexical databases are important for re-
searchers in Psycholinguistics and other related areas, providing
a pool of experimental materials and allowing for an efficient
process of selection of these experimental materials.
The process of gathering statistics is slow, resulting in a
small pool of materials in the short-term. The need to find an
alternative method to gather limited or yet unavailable statistics
for a specific language led us to consider gathering statistics
from other languages and to compute their triangulation. Our
aim was to automatize the computation of statistics such as Fa-
miliarity, Imageability, Age of Acquisition and Written Word
Frequency for that specific language.
We will describe the process of preparing this data and tri-
angulating and comparing statistics for some languages in an at-
tempt of finding a relationship between them. The results were
analysed considering correlations between each statistic in each
pair of languages and by computing the mean of absolute dif-
ferences between each language’s values.
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - "European Portuguese words” (PTDC/PSI-PCO/104679/2008)
National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF)
Operational Agenda for Competitiveness Factors (COMPETE)
European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).