SPALEX: A Spanish Lexical Decision Database From a Massive Online Data Collection

Review: "Megastudy is the term coined to refer to large-scale experiments completed by thousands (or even hundred-thousands) of participants (Chetail et al., 2015; Gimenes et al., 2016). These types of studies have exponentially increased in the last decade, from around 130 publications referencing the term in 2007 to more than 300 in 2017 (Kuperman, 2015). Their uses span different fields, such as cognitive science, medicine, education, and psychology research. Particularly for the field of psycholinguistics, the increasing demand for massive and diverse databases upon which non-trivial hypotheses and models can be tested, has led to a dramatic increase in large-scale lexical megastudies (Keuleers and Balota, 2015). Lexical decision megastudies have been carried out in multiple languages, including American and British English ((Balota et al., 2007; Keuleers et al., 2012); respectively), French (Ferrand et al., 2010), and Dutch (Keuleers et al., 2010; Brysbaert et al., 2016). In Spanish, previous laboratory studies have explored the effects of psycholinguistic variables on a large amount of words, but with a relatively small number of participants (Davies et al., 2013; González-Nosti et al., 2014). Although these are laboratory studies that involve a large number of participants, or a large number of words, other approaches, such as crowdsourced megastudies, distributed through online platforms, allow the collection of information with large numbers of participants and words at a reduced cost (Keuleers et al., 2015). The shift in view from the laboratory to this type of crowdsourced research makes novel technologies like smartphones or tablets powerful research tools that allow for large-scale studies (Dufau et al., 2011). Likewise, large-scale studies have the benefit of studying and quantifying phenomena of interest across a varied and a vast number of participants. Another essential advantage of megastudies is the ability to conduct virtual experiments with randomly selected samples within the same database to test multiple hypotheses of different nature (Kuperman, 2015). They are becoming essential for psycholinguistic studies, as the study of language has been traditionally focalized in small and homogeneous groups of participants, not allowing the evaluation of important factors, such as previous linguistic experience, degree of second-language proficiency, or age, to cite a few (Keuleers et al., 2015). In all, megastudies provide a robust framework to test theories and provide important information that can be used for further experimentation. So far, no previous attempt has been made to produce a crowdsourced lexical decision megastudy in Spanish, which with about 400 million speakers across the world (Ethnologue, 2016), is the second most used native language after Chinese. A well-designed study would also allow highlighting differences in how Spanish is used in the more than 20 Spanish-speaking countries across the globe. Moreover, the database presented here, henceforth called SPALEX, adds to the increasing literature on lexical decision megastudies by focusing on native Spanish speakers at a global scale and with a vast amount of words, to provide a useful tool for researchers exploring the acquisition and processing of this language in native and foreign contexts.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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