Automating psycholinguistic statistics computation: Procura-PALavras

This article describes psycholinguistic lexical databases available in various languages, including English, Spanish and Portuguese. These lexical databases are important for researchers in Psycholinguistics and other related areas, providing a pool of experimental materials and allowing for an efficient process of selection of these experimental materials. The process of gathering statistics is slow, resulting in a small pool of materials in the short-term. The need to find an alternative method to gather limited or yet unavailable statistics for a specific language led us to consider gathering statistics from other languages and to compute their triangulation. Our aim was to automatize the computation of statistics such as Familiarity, Imageability, Age of Acquisition and Written Word Frequency for that specific language. We will describe the process of preparing this data and triangulating and comparing statistics for some languages in an attempt of finding a relationship between them. The results were analysed considering correlations between each statistic in each pair of languages and by computing the mean of absolute differences between each language’s values.