SUBTLEX-CY: A new word frequency database for Welsh

van Heuven, Walter J. B.; Payne, Joshua S; Jones, Manon W

Abstract

We present SUBTLEX-CY, a new word frequency database created from a 32-million-word corpus of Welsh television subtitles. An experiment comprising a lexical decision task examined SUBTLEX-CY frequency estimates against words with inconsistent frequencies in a much smaller Welsh corpus that is often used by researchers, the Cronfa Electroneg o’r Gymraeg (CEG), and three other Welsh word frequency databases. Words were selected that were classified as low frequency (LF) in SUBTLEX-CY and high frequency (HF) in CEG and compared with words that were classified as medium frequency (MF) in both SUBTLEX-CY and CEG. Reaction time analyses showed that HF words in CEG were responded to more slowly compared to MF words, suggesting that SUBTLEX-CY corpus provides a more reliable estimate of Welsh word frequencies. The new Welsh word frequency database that also includes part-of-speech, contextual diversity, and other lexical information is freely available for research purposes on the Open Science Framework repository at https://osf.io/9gkqm/.

Citation

van Heuven, W. J. B., Payne, J. S., & Jones, M. W. (2024). SUBTLEX-CY: A new word frequency database for Welsh. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 77(5), 1052-1067. https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231190315

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jun 27, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Aug 30, 2023
• Publication Date: 2024-05
• Deposit Date: Aug 25, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Aug 25, 2023
• Journal: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
• Print ISSN: 1747-0218
• Electronic ISSN: 1747-0226
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 77
• Issue: 5
• Pages: 1052-1067
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218231190315
• Keywords: Welsh; Word Frequency; Visual word recognition
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/23593262
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231190315