TY - JOUR
T1 - How do Spanish speakers read words?
T2 - Insights from a crowdsourced lexical decision megastudy
AU - Aguasvivas, Jose
AU - Carreiras, Manuel
AU - Brysbaert, Marc
AU - Mandera, Paweł
AU - Keuleers, Emmanuel
AU - Duñabeitia, Jon Andoni
N1 - Funding Information:
This research is supported by the Basque Government through the BERC 2018-2021 program and by the Spanish State Research Agency through BCBL Severo Ochoa excellence accreditation SEV-2015-0490. This study was also partially supported by grants PGC2018-097145-B-I00, RED2018-102615-T, and RTI2018-093547-B-I00 from the Spanish State Research Agency. Work by JA was supported by “la Caixa” Foundation and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 713673, and fellowship code LCF/BQ/IN17/116200154004. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments and efforts towards improving this manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020/10
Y1 - 2020/10
N2 - Vocabulary size seems to be affected by multiple factors, including those that belong to the properties of the words themselves and those that relate to the characteristics of the individuals assessing the words. In this study, we present results from a crowdsourced lexical decision megastudy in which more than 150,000 native speakers from around 20 Spanish-speaking countries performed a lexical decision task to 70 target word items selected from a list of about 45,000 Spanish words. We examined how demographic characteristics such as age, education level, and multilingualism affected participants' vocabulary size. Also, we explored how common factors related to words like frequency, length, and orthographic neighbourhood influenced the knowledge of a particular item. Results indicated important contributions of age to overall vocabulary size, with vocabulary size increasing in a logarithmic fashion with this factor. Furthermore, a contrast between monolingual and bilingual communities within Spain revealed no significant vocabulary size differences between the communities. Additionally, we replicated the standard effects of the words' properties and their interactions, accurately accounting for the estimated knowledge of a particular word. These results highlight the value of crowdsourced approaches to uncover effects that are traditionally masked by small-sampled in-lab factorial experimental designs.
AB - Vocabulary size seems to be affected by multiple factors, including those that belong to the properties of the words themselves and those that relate to the characteristics of the individuals assessing the words. In this study, we present results from a crowdsourced lexical decision megastudy in which more than 150,000 native speakers from around 20 Spanish-speaking countries performed a lexical decision task to 70 target word items selected from a list of about 45,000 Spanish words. We examined how demographic characteristics such as age, education level, and multilingualism affected participants' vocabulary size. Also, we explored how common factors related to words like frequency, length, and orthographic neighbourhood influenced the knowledge of a particular item. Results indicated important contributions of age to overall vocabulary size, with vocabulary size increasing in a logarithmic fashion with this factor. Furthermore, a contrast between monolingual and bilingual communities within Spain revealed no significant vocabulary size differences between the communities. Additionally, we replicated the standard effects of the words' properties and their interactions, accurately accounting for the estimated knowledge of a particular word. These results highlight the value of crowdsourced approaches to uncover effects that are traditionally masked by small-sampled in-lab factorial experimental designs.
KW - Ageing
KW - Crowdsourcing megastudy
KW - FREQUENCY
KW - ORTHOGRAPHIC NEIGHBORHOOD
KW - PERFORMANCE
KW - PREVALENCE
KW - PROJECT
KW - RECEPTIVE VOCABULARY DIFFERENCES
KW - RECOGNITION
KW - SCORES
KW - SIMILARITY
KW - Spanish lexical decision
KW - TASK
KW - Vocabulary size
U2 - 10.3758/s13428-020-01357-9
DO - 10.3758/s13428-020-01357-9
M3 - Article
C2 - 32072567
SN - 1554-351X
VL - 52
SP - 1867
EP - 1882
JO - Behavior Research Methods
JF - Behavior Research Methods
IS - 5
ER -