Guide of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
About SYLLABARIUM
How to use the application
About SYLLABARIUM
- What is SYLLABARIUM?
- SYLLABARIUM is an online application for deriving complete statistics for Basque and Spanish syllables.
- Who might be interested in SYLLABARIUM?
- The target users of SYLLABARIUM are linguists, psycholinguists and neuroscientific researchers interested on syllable distributions in Basque and Spanish and in syllabic processing in language perception and production.
- What is the usefulness of SYLLABARIUM?
- One of the major challenges for researchers aimed at exploring syllabic processing is the appropriate selection of experimental items. In last decades, psycholinguistic evidence has highlighted a number of syllabic measures that determine reading and speaking performance. SYLLABARIUM attempts at providing complete information regarding syllables in Basque and Spanish, as well as at offering experimenters possible items for their experiments.
- Why does SYLLABARIUM include Basque and Spanish syllables?
- Spanish is the language in which the influence of the syllable has been most extensively studied. On the contrary, experimental research on syllabic processing in Basque is rather scarce. However, considering that a huge number of Basque speakers are also Spanish speakers (i.e., Basque-Spanish balanced bilinguals), the combination of these two languages in a single software for analyzing and selecting syllables provides psycholinguists with an invaluable tool for designing experiments aimed at clarifying the role of the syllable in bilingual individuals, which should be one of the next steps in syllable research.
- Where are the syllables obtained from?
- In order to create the syllable database for Basque and Spanish, the two most common lexical databases in these languages were used. The base lexicons used by the Spanish B-PAL (Davis & Perea, 2005) and by the Basque E-HITZ (Perea et al., 2006), were selected for creating the base corpora of SYLLABARIUM. In their lemmatized form, the Spanish lexicon was composed of 31,491 words, and the Basque corpus was composed of 18,511 words. All the different syllables from the two lexicons were found and counted.
- How many syllables are included in SYLLABARIUM?
- 1,751 different syllables were obtained from the Spanish database, while 1,481 different syllables were obtained from the Basque database. 762 of these syllables were present in both databases, 989 were exclusively present in the Spanish database, and 719 syllables only existed in the Basque database.
How to use the application
- How can the user select the search language(s) in SYLLABARIUM?
- There are three selectable basic search options, depending on the language(s) in which the user wants to perform the search: 1) Basque, 2) Spanish, and 2) both. The user simply has to select the desired option.
- Select target language(s).
- Insert target syllable(s) for search.
- Insert type/token frequency restriction.
- Insert type/token positional frequency restriction.
- Clear the form or Submit the search options.
- How can the user search for the statistics of a given syllable(s) in SYLLABARIUM?
- In the text box Syllable(s) the user can type either a single target syllable or a set of syllables. When more than one syllable wants to be searched for, the syllables have to be inserted by separating them with a space. For instance, if a user wants to get the statistics for the syllables BA and BE, these have to inserted into the text box in the following way: BA BE.
- How can the user search in SYLLABARIUM for a set of syllables that satisfy a series of criteria?
- As seen in the figure above, the user can specify a series of search restrictions in order to get the syllables that satisfy those requirements (rather than searching for the statistics of a set of syllables). These restrictions are referred to the general frequencies (type and/or token) of the syllables across positions, and to the positional frequencies (type and/or token) of the syllables (namely, to the frequencies of the syllables in the different string positions). Maximum and/or minimum values can be inserted by typing the corresponding values into the text boxes. The user can include as many restriction criteria as desired.
- How is the search options submitted to SYLLABARIUM?
- Once the search options have been typed in the form, the user should click on the Submit button.
- What if the user wants to correct something from the SYLLABARIUM search form?
- By clicking on the Clear button, the form will be emptied so that the user can introduce new search parameters.
- What does the user get from SYLLABARIUM?
- After a search has been submitted, the resulting page will display a large set of characteristics corresponding to the searched syllables and/or to the syllables that satisfy the imposed restrictions.
- Type frequency of the syllable (total number of appearances).
- Token frequency of the syllable (summed lexical frequency of the words containing the syllable).
- Mean lexical frequency of the words containing the syllable.
- Standard deviation of (3).
- Lexical frequency of the highest frequency word containing the syllable.
- Highest frequency word containing the syllable.
- Letter frequency.
- Type and token positional frequencies of the syllable.
- Summary of the search parameters.
- Export a plain text file containing the words that include the syllable(s).
- What does each value in the SYLLABARIUM results display refer to?
- Frequency: Type frequency of the syllable. This corresponds to the number of appearances of the syllable in the selected database(s).
- Sum. Frq.: Token frequency of the syllable. This corresponds to the summed lexical frequency of the words containing the syllable that are found in the selected database(s).
- Mean Frq.: Mean lexical frequency of the words containing the syllable that are found in the selected database(s).
- Std. Frq.: Standard deviation of the lexical frequency of the words containing the syllable that are found in the selected database(s).
- Highest Frq.: Lexical frequency of the highest lexical frequency word found in the selected database(s) containing the syllable.
- Hi. Frq. Word: String corresponding to the highest lexical frequency word found in the selected database(s) containing the syllable.
- Frequencies Pos. 1/Pos. 2/Pos. 3/Pos. 4/Pos. 5/Pos. 6/Pos. 7: Type and token frequencies of the syllable, separated by syllabic positions (e.g., POS.1=First syllable).
- How can the user retrieve from SYLLABARIUM a list of words containing the syllable(s) that satisfy the search criterium/criteria?
- The Export words tab offers the possibility of exporting a complete list of words containing the syllable(s) that satisfy the search criterium/criteria. Moreover, the user can specify the maximum and/or minimum length in number of letters and/or number of syllables of the words that will be returned. By clicking on the Export button, a pop-up window will be opened allowing for either opening or saving the plain text file (called words.txt) containing these words, together with their syllabic information and a number of different useful indices that researchers might want to know.
The words.txt plain text file is coded using the UTF-8 character set. The different fields for each single word are comma-separated. Considering this two features, the import process to a spreadsheet or database is rather straightforward.
- How can the user return to the SYLLABARIUM search display?
- By clicking on the Search again link, a new search form will be opened.
- SYLLABARIUM is not working properly. What can the user do?
- Any problem or doubt about SYLLABARIUM can be submitted by electronic mail to any of the authors:
- Jon Andoni Duñabeitia: jaduna@ull.es
- Joana Cholin: jcholin@ull.es
- Jose Corral: jcorral@ull.es
- Manuel Perea: mperea@uv.es
- Manuel Carreiras: m.carreiras@bcbl.eu