Using online databases

Host: Victor Kuperman (McMaster University)

Date: April 21, 2020

Time: 12:00pm EDT (GMT -4)

A large number of behavioural datasets in multiple languages were made available for psycholinguists in the last decades. These include both databases with outcomes of behavioural tasks (lexical decision, eye-tracking, naming, semantic classification); databases with judgements or ratings on lexical variables (age-of-acquisition, imageability, affect, concreteness); and corpora documenting natural language productions. All these sources can be fruitfully used for doing psycholinguistic research without a lab, i.e., conducting “virtual experiments” without collecting additional data. I will begin with a brief overview of available resources (for an authoritative list see http://crr.ugent.be/programs-data/megastudy-data-available). Then I will show how different resources can be combined and analyzed jointly to study effects of lexical variables on language behaviour, across multiple languages and tasks. We will be using the R library tidyverse(). Only very basic knowledge of R is expected.

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