LexiCAL: A calculator for lexical variables.

While a number of tools have been developed for researchers to compute the lexical characteristics of words, extant resources are limited in their useability and functionality. Specifically, some tools require users to have some prior knowledge of some aspects of the applications, and not all tools allow users to specify their own corpora. Additionally, current tools are also limited in terms of the range of metrics that they can compute. To address these methodological gaps, this article introduces LexiCAL, a fast, simple, and intuitive calculator for lexical variables. Specifically, LexiCAL is a standalone executable that provides options for users to calculate a range of theoretically influential surface, orthographic, phonological, and phonographic metrics for any alphabetic language, using any user-specified input, corpus file, and phonetic system. LexiCAL also comes with a set of well-documented Python scripts for each metric, that can be reproduced and/or modified for other research purposes.

Consistency norms for 37,677 english words.

Consistency reflects the mapping between spelling and sound. That is, a word is feedforward consistent if its pronunciation matches that of similarly spelled words, and feedback consistent if its spelling matches that of similar pronounced words. For a quasi-regular language such as English, the study of consistency effects on lexical processing has been limited by the lack of readily accessible norms. In order to improve current methodological resources, feedforward (spelling-to-sound) and feedback (sound-to-spelling) consistency measures for 37,677 English words were computed. The consistency measures developed here are operationalized at the composite level for multisyllabic words, and at different sub-syllabic segments (onset, nucleus, coda, oncleus, and rime) for both monosyllabic and multisyllabic words. These measures constitute the largest database of English consistency norms to be developed, and will be a valuable resource for researchers to explore the effects of consistency on lexical processes, such as word recognition and spelling. The norms are available as supplementary material with this paper.