A Turkish Database for Psycholinguistic Studies Based on Frequency, Age of Acquisition, and Imageability

A Turkish Database for Psycholinguistic Studies Based on Frequency, Age of Acquisition, and Imageability Elif Ahsen Acar, Deniz Zeyrek, Murathan Kurfalı, Cem Bozşahin Cognitive Science Department Informatics Institute, Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Turkey E-mail: ahsen.tolgay@metu.edu.tr, dezeyrek@metu.edu.tr, kurfali@metu.edu.tr, bozsahin@metu.edu.tr Abstract This study primarily aims to build a Turkish psycholinguistic database including three variables: word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability, where AoA and imageability information are limited to nouns. We used a corpus-based approach to obtain information about the AoA variable. We built two corpora: a child literature corpus (CLC) including 535 books written for 3-12 years old children, and a corpus of transcribed children's speech (CSC) at ages 1;4-4;8. A comparison between the word frequencies of CLC and CSC gave positive correlation results, suggesting the usability of the CLC to extract AoA information. We assumed that frequent words of the CLC would correspond to early acquired words whereas frequent words of a corpus of adult language would correspond to late acquired words. To validate AoA results from our corpus-based approach, a rated AoA questionnaire was conducted on adults. Imageability values were collected via a different questionnaire conducted on adults. We conclude that it is possible to deduce AoA information for high frequency words with the corpus-based approach. The results about low frequency words were inconclusive, which is attributed to the fact that corpus-based AoA information is affected by the strong negative correlation between corpus frequency and rated AoA. Keywords: psycholinguistic database, frequency, age of acquisition, imageability, corpus study 1 . Introduction Psycholinguistic databases are reliable and practical sources for researchers since they provide standardized stimuli for scientific queries. They allow researchers to access a large pool of data and manipulate variables that suit their experimental purposes. Linguistic variables are usually language-specific. For Turkish, resources for psycholinguistic variables exist but are scarce. In this study, we aim to contribute to the existing resources. We first describe the preliminaries of a psycholinguistic database containing ratings on age of acquisition (AoA) and imageability obtained from adult participants, and frequency, lexical category, and number of letters of words obtained from corpora.1 Then, we offer a unique corpus-based method to obtain AoA values. A corpus-based method was first used by Carroll and White (1973) who took (English) word frequency counts from corpora of children's vocabulary (assembled by Rinsland, 1945; Dale, 1948; Dale & Eichholz, 1960) to assign AoA values to words that should be known in reading and used in writing by grade school children. The authors used these frequency counts for validity testing, which was affirmative. The corpora they used were designed for teachers to assist them in teaching vocabulary to children (i.e., the words in the corpora are words that are expected to be taught to children at a certain age, rather than the words that are reported to be known by them). The results of our 1 The database is freely available to researchers upon request via e-mail at ahsen.tolgay@metu.edu.tr study may be useful for researchers who deal with …

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