A familiarity database was developed for about 80,000 Japanese words of which familiarity scores were rated by 32 Japanese adults using a 7-point scale in auditory, visual, and audio-visual modalities. Auditory, visual, and audio-visual stimulus words were selected from the database according to their word familiarity for size estimation of the mental lexicon. Sixty Japanese adults participated in a two-alternative forced-choice task (Know-Don't know) for the stimulus words. The size of the mental lexicon was estimated as the number of words of which familiarity is above a particular word corresponding to 50% point on the fitted logistic curve to "know"-response probability of the stimulus words. The estimated size was about 68,000 for auditory words, and about 66,000 both for visual and audio-visual words when homophones and homographs were included. The results suggest that very small difference in the mental lexicon size among modalities.
Cite as: Amano, S., Kondo, T. (1998) Estimation of mental lexicon size with word familiarity database. Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998), paper 0015, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.1998-442
@inproceedings{amano98_icslp,
author={Shigeaki Amano and Tadahisa Kondo},
title={{Estimation of mental lexicon size with word familiarity database}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. 5th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 1998)},
pages={paper 0015},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.1998-442}
}