Megastudies, crowdsourcing, and large datasets in psycholinguistics: An overview of recent developments

Abstract

This paper introduces and summarizes the special issue on megastudies, crowdsourcing, and large datasets in psycholinguistics. We provide a brief historical overview and show how the papers in this issue have extended the field by compiling new databases and making important theoretical contributions. In addition, we discuss several studies that use text corpora to build distributional semantic models to tackle various interesting problems in psycholinguistics. Finally, as is the case across the papers, we highlight some methodological issues that are brought forth via the analyses of such datasets.

Keywords:

• Megastudies
• Crowdsourcing
• Language processing
• Corpora
• Distributional semantics