Procura-PALavras (P-PAL): A Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese lexical database.

In this article, we present Procura-PALavras (P-PAL), a Web-based interface for a new European Portuguese (EP) lexical database. Based on a contemporary printed corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL provides a broad range of word attributes and statistics, including several measures of word frequency (e.g., raw counts, per-million word frequency, logarithmic Zipf scale), morpho-syntactic information (e.g., parts of speech [PoSs], grammatical gender and number, dominant PoS, and frequency and relative frequency of the dominant PoS), as well as several lexical and sublexical orthographic (e.g., number of letters; consonant-vowel orthographic structure; density and frequency of orthographic neighbors; orthographic Levenshtein distance; orthographic uniqueness point; orthographic syllabification; and trigram, bigram, and letter type and token frequencies), and phonological measures (e.g., pronunciation, number of phonemes, stress, density and frequency of phonological neighbors, transposed and phonographic neighbors, syllabification, and biphone and phone type and token frequencies) for ~53,000 lemmatized and ~208,000 nonlemmatized EP word forms. To obtain these metrics, researchers can choose between two word queries in the application: (i) analyze words previously selected for specific attributes and/or lexical and sublexical characteristics, or (ii) generate word lists that meet word requirements defined by the user in the menu of analyses. For the measures it provides and the flexibility it allows, P-PAL will be a key resource to support research in all cognitive areas that use EP verbal stimuli. P-PAL is freely available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools .

ESCOLEX: a grade-level lexical database from European Portuguese elementary to middle school textbooks.

In this article, we introduce ESCOLEX, the first European Portuguese children's lexical database with grade-level-adjusted word frequency statistics. Computed from a 3.2-million-word corpus, ESCOLEX provides 48,381 word forms extracted from 171 elementary and middle school textbooks for 6- to 11-year-old children attending the first six grades in the Portuguese educational system. Like other children's grade-level databases (e.g., Carroll, Davies, & Richman, 1971; Corral, Ferrero, & Goikoetxea, Behavior Research Methods, 41, 1009-1017, 2009; Lété, Sprenger-Charolles, & Colé, Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36, 156-166, 2004; Zeno, Ivens, Millard, Duvvuri, 1995), ESCOLEX provides four frequency indices for each grade: overall word frequency (F), index of dispersion across the selected textbooks (D), estimated frequency per million words (U), and standard frequency index (SFI). It also provides a new measure, contextual diversity (CD). In addition, the number of letters in the word and its part(s) of speech, number of syllables, syllable structure, and adult frequencies taken from P-PAL (a European Portuguese corpus-based lexical database; Soares, Comesaña, Iriarte, Almeida, Simões, Costa, …, Machado, 2010; Soares, Iriarte, Almeida, Simões, Costa, França, …, Comesaña, in press) are provided. ESCOLEX will be a useful tool both for researchers interested in language processing and development and for professionals in need of verbal materials adjusted to children's developmental stages. ESCOLEX can be downloaded along with this article or from http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases .

On the advantages of word frequency and contextual diversity measures extracted from subtitles: The case of Portuguese.

We examined the potential advantage of the lexical databases using subtitles and present SUBTLEX-PT, a new lexical database for 132,710 Portuguese words obtained from a 78 million corpus based on film and television series subtitles, offering word frequency and contextual diversity measures. Additionally we validated SUBTLEX-PT with a lexical decision study involving 1920 Portuguese words (and 1920 nonwords) with different lengths in letters (M = 6.89, SD = 2.10) and syllables (M = 2.99, SD = 0.94). Multiple regression analyses on latency and accuracy data were conducted to compare the proportion of variance explained by the Portuguese subtitle word frequency measures with that accounted by the recent written-word frequency database (Procura-PALavras; P-PAL; Soares, Iriarte, et al., 2014 ). As its international counterparts, SUBTLEX-PT explains approximately 15% more of the variance in the lexical decision performance of young adults than the P-PAL database. Moreover, in line with recent studies, contextual diversity accounted for approximately 2% more of the variance in participants' reading performance than the raw frequency counts obtained from subtitles. SUBTLEX-PT is freely available for research purposes (at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/about/databases ).

Procura-PALavras (P-Pal): uma nova medida de frequência lexical do português europeu contemporâneo / Procura-PALavras (P-Pal): a new measure of word frequency for contemporary european portuguese

Neste trabalho apresentamos as estratégias e os procedimentos adoptados na constituição de uma nova medida de frequência lexical do Português Europeu contemporâneo, o Procura-PALavras (P-PAL). Baseado num corpus de mais de 227 milhões de palavras, o P-PAL é uma aplicação web que oferece, por defeito, valores de frequência lexical para todas as suas entradas lexicais (lemas e formas) e que permite a computação de uma grande diversidade de outras medidas objectivas (lexicais e sublexicais) e subjectivas. Descrevemos ainda o processo de definição das suas entradas lexicais e da extracção dos respectivos valores de frequência. O elevado número de índices e de entradas lexicais tornam o P-PAL numa aplicação web avançada e indispensável à promoção e internacionalização da investigação em Portugal. O P-PAL encontra-se disponível em http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.

In this paper we present the strategies and procedures undertaken in the development of a new measure of lexical frequency of the contemporary European Portuguese - Procura-PALavras (P-PAL). Based on a corpus of over 227 million words, P-PAL offers the default frequency per million words (lemmas and wordforms), and the computation of several other objective (lexical and sublexical) and subjective word metrics. We also describe lexical entry integration and word frequency extraction. The high number of indices and lexical entries makes P-PAL an advanced and indispensable web application for the promotion and internationalization of Portuguese research. P-PAL is available at http://p-pal.di.uminho.pt/tools.