MaltLex
My dissertation research consists of a visual lexical decision megastudy for the Semitic language Maltese, and the subsequent construction of a database of visual lexical decision responses called "MaltLex". You can download a copy of my dissertation by clicking here.

Megastudies, in which researchers collect many behavioral responses to a wide range of stimuli, often from a wide range of participants, have grown in popularity in recent years as an alternative to traditional factorial experiments. In a megastudy, participants encounter a diverse set of linguistic items that better approximates real language experience, thus avoiding potential context effects that reflect an artificial similarity among test items that may occur in factorial studies. Any researcher can then analyze a subset of the total dataset to explore some variable(s) of interest, while simultaneously being able to control for other factors that are known to influence language processing.

MaltLex consists of ~237,500 lexical decision responses to ~11,000 real Maltese words and ~11,000 phonotactically legal non-words, from 104 native or near-native Maltese speakers. MaltLex is unique among visual lexical decision megastudies in that it is the first to focus on a Semitic language, which characteristically use nonconcatenative morphological processes in native word stems. MaltLex is also the first megastudy to include measures of relative language use and proficiency from a bilingual participant population.

You can download a copy of the trial-by-trial results from MaltLex as a .csv file, as well as other important datasets, from the links below.

Datasets

Preferred citation

    Geary, Jonathan A. (2022). The constraints of dual morphological systems on visual word processing in Maltese. PhD Thesis, University of Arizona. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/667678.