Written Language & Literacy - Volume 20, Issue 1, 2017

The increased globalization of science and technology and the growing number of bilinguals and multilinguals in the world have made research with multiple languages a mainstay for scholars who study human function and especially those who focus on language, cognition, and the brain. Such research can benefit from large-scale databases and online resources that describe and measure lexical, phonological, orthographic, and semantic information. The present paper discusses currently-available resources and underscores the need for tools that enable measurements both within and across multiple languages. A general review of language databases is followed by a targeted introduction to databases of orthographic and phonological neighborhoods. A specific focus on CLEARPOND illustrates how databases can be used to assess and compare neighborhood information across languages, to develop research materials, and to provide insight into broad questions about language. As an example of how using large-scale databases can answer questions about language, a closer look at neighborhood effects on lexical access reveals that not only orthographic, but also phonological neighborhoods can influence visual lexical access both within and across languages. We conclude that capitalizing upon large-scale linguistic databases can advance, refine, and accelerate scientific discoveries about the human linguistic capacity.

As a significant milestone within ongoing efforts to construct a comprehensive database in the form of a lexical resource (LR) of Japanese Lexical Properties (JLP-LR), this paper outlines the initial construction of an Ontology of Japanese Lexical Properties (JLP-O) ( Joyce & Hodošček 2014 ), and, in particular, describes some of its key aspects specifically incorporated in order to satisfactorily handle the orthographic complexity of the Japanese writing system ( Joyce 2013 , 2016 ; Joyce, Hodošček & Nishina 2012 ). While motivated primarily by issues of orthographic representation for the Japanese lexicon, these key features potentially have wider implications for the effective construction of integrated orthographic databases and lexicons.

The BasisSpellingBank is the first lexicon where the spellings and pronunciations of words are documented explicitly and separately for all relevant word parts. Unlike earlier descriptions of Dutch orthography in terms of rules and underlying forms, the BasisSpellingBank departs from the concept of storage and the way spelling is taught in schools. At its core are triplets of phoneme(s), grapheme(s), and the spelling category(s) which describe the correspondences between them. The triplet notation provides a detailed, exhaustive description of Dutch orthography. It is a formal system that could be used to describe other alphabetic writing systems as well. By integrating information about orthographic rules and lexical storage, the triplet notation more adequately describes the knowledge possessed by fluent users. The triplets unlock exact measures of both forward and backward consistency, which opens up detailed analyses of spelling performance. The database provides new insights into spelling education and spelling complexity.

During the last few decades, empirical research on reading has shown increasing interest in syllable units. More recently, stress assignment has become a particular focus of interest. The relation between syllables and stress, however, has yet to be investigated for Italian. In this paper, we describe a new database, STRESYL, that can help researchers to investigate the relation between syllables and stress in Italian. STRESYL offers type and token measures relating stress information to syllable units, both in terms of syllable forms and syllabic structures.

The CELEX lexical database ( Baayen, Piepenbrock & van Rijn 1995 ) was developed in the 1990s, providing a database of the syntactic, morphological, phonological and orthographic forms of between 50,000 and 125,000 words of Dutch, English and German. This database was used as the basis for the development of the PolyLex lexicons, which included syntactic, morphological and phonological information for around 3,000 words of Dutch, English and German. Orthographic information was subsequently added in the PolyOrth project. The PolyOrth project was based on the assumption that the underlying, lexical phonological forms could be used to derive the surface orthographic forms by means of a combination of phoneme-grapheme mappings and sets of autonomous spelling rules for each language. One of the complications encountered during the project was the fact that the phonological forms in CELEX were not always genuinely underlying forms which made deriving the orthographic forms tricky. This paper discusses the nature and status of underlying phonological forms, their relation to orthography and the issues of finding this information in databases.