Norwegian Words: A lexical database for clinicians and researchers

Abstract

All words have properties linked to form, meaning and usage patterns which influence how easily they are accessed from the mental lexicon in language production, perception and comprehension. Examples of such properties are imageability, phonological and morphological complexity, word class, argument structure, frequency of use and age of acquisition. Due to linguistic and cultural variation the properties and the values associated with them differ across languages. Hence, for research as well as clinical purposes, language specific information on lexical properties is needed. To meet this need, an electronically searchable lexical database with more than 1600 Norwegian words coded for more than 12 different properties has been established. This article presents the content and structure of the database as well as the search options available in the interface. Finally, it briefly describes some of the ways in which the database can be used in research, clinical practice and teaching.

• Age of acquisition
• frequency
• imageability
• language processing
• phonological neighbourhood density

Acknowledgements

The database Norwegian Words was presented at the ICPLA conference in Stockholm, 11–13 June, 2014. We thank the audience as well as the reviewers for helpful questions and comments. We also thank Ingeborg Ribu for comments on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest.

Notice of Correction

Changes have been made to this article since its original online publication date of 14 January 2015.

Notes

¹In Norwegian, there are two official written standards (Bokmål and Nynorsk) as well as a number of dialects that are widely used in formal as well as in less formal settings. The written standards and most of the dialects are mutually intelligible. Bokmål is used as the written language by the majority of Norwegians.

²Literally, ordforrådet translates as the vocabulary.

³Thirteen homographs from the CLT “best words” list were kept, though, since they were important for cross-linguistic comparison with more than 30 other languages. These words were disambiguated with an extra word in parentheses. For instance, et bein translates to “bone” and to “leg”, and was disambiguated by knokkel “bone” and kroppsdel “body part”, respectively.

⁴http://www.nob-ordbok.uio.no.

⁵The software LINGUA is freely available online from: http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/~westburylab/downloads/lingua.download.html.

⁶For the survey on AoA as well as for the survey on imageability, information was sent to The Norwegian Social Science Data Services, and the relevant permits were obtained.

⁷It is unfortunately not yet possible to search for several words simultaneously (as a list).

⁸These 10 verbs are of course not all the disyllabic, high imageability verbs in Norwegian, but they are the only verbs in the database that fit with the chosen criteria.