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The LEXIN database offers psycholinguistic indexes of the 13,184 different words (types) computed from 178,839 occurrences of these words (tokens) contained in a corpus of 134 beginning readers widely used in Spain. This database provides four statistical indicators: F (overall word frequency), D (index of dispersion across selected readers), U (estimated frequency per million words), and SFI (standard frequency index). It also gives information about the number of letters, syntactic category, and syllabic structure of the words included. To facilitate comparisons, LEXIN provides data from LEXESP's (Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Cuetos, & Carreiras, 2000), Alameda and Cuetos's (1995), and Martínez and García's (2004) Spanish adult psycholinguistic frequency databases. Access to the LEXIN database is facilitated by a computer program. The LEXIN program allows for the creation of word lists by letting the user specify searching criteria. LEXIN can be useful for researchers in cognitive psychology, particularly in the areas of psycholinguistics and education.
Psycholinguistic databases collect indexes of psycholinguistic properties of words. This information is very useful for experimental psychologists interested in controlled research with oral and written language stimuli. The use of these psycholinguistic indexes started within the field of applied educational psychology (see, e.g., Thorndike, 1921) and expanded to more basic cognitive research, such as research on visual word recognition.
One important index of printed words is the frequency of occurrence; written frequency has been shown to influence reading accuracy and response times to words greatly. Specifically, research has demonstrated that highfrequency words are responded to more quickly and more accurately than low-frequency words are (Becker, 1976; Forster & Chambers, 1973; for a lexical decision task, see Balota & Chumbley, 1984; for a pioneering work, see Cattell, 1886; for a word-naming task, see Hino & Lupker, 2000; for a review on word frequency effects, see Monsell, 1991). This lexical frequency effect is also evident in the reading performance of neuropsychological patients, such as dyslexics (for a revision, see Behrmann, Plaut, & Nelson, 1998) and patients with Alzheimer's disease (see, e.g., Glosser, Grugan, & Friedman, 1999).
Printed-word frequency counts are usually obtained by collecting words from a representative pool of print resources that are read by a particular group of readers. These counts are presented as frequency dictionaries or frequency norms. Two of the...