This study primarily aims to build a Turkish psycholinguistic database including three variables: word frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and imageability, where AoA and imageability information are limited to nouns. We used a corpus-based approach to obtain information about the AoA variable. We built two corpora: a child literature corpus (CLC) including 535 books written for 3-12 years old children, and a corpus of transcribed children’s speech (CSC) at ages 1;4-4;8. A comparison between the word frequencies of CLC and CSC gave positive correlation results, suggesting the usability of the CLC to extract AoA information. We assumed that frequent words of the CLC would correspond to early acquired words whereas frequent words of a corpus of adult language would correspond to late acquired words. To validate AoA results from our corpus-based approach, a rated AoA questionnaire was conducted on adults. Imageability values were collected via a different questionnaire conducted on adults. We conclude that it is possible to deduce AoA information for high frequency words with the corpus-based approach. The results about low frequency words were inconclusive, which is attributed to the fact that corpus-based AoA information is affected by the strong negative correlation between corpus frequency and rated AoA.

We report two tools to conduct psycholinguistic experiments on Turkish words. KelimetriK allows experimenters to choose words based on desired orthographic scores of word frequency, bigram and trigram frequency, ON, OLD20, ATL and subset/superset similarity. Turkish version of Wuggy generates pseudowords from one or more template words using an efficient method. The syllabified version of the words are used as the input, which are decomposed into their sub-syllabic components. The bigram frequency chains are constructed by the entire words’ onset, nucleus and coda patterns. Lexical statistics of stems and their syllabification are compiled by us from BOUN corpus of 490 million words. Use of these tools in some experiments is shown.