SUBTLEX-NL: a new measure for Dutch word frequency based on film subtitles

Abstract

We present a new database of Dutch word frequencies based on film and television subtitles, and we validate it with a lexical decision study involving 14,000 monosyllabic and disyllabic Dutch words. The new SUBTLEX frequencies explain up to 10% more variance in accuracies and reaction times (RTs) of the lexical decision task than the existing CELEX word frequency norms, which are based largely on edited texts. As is the case for English, an accessibility measure based on contextual diversity explains more of the variance in accuracy and RT than does the raw frequency of occurrence counts. The database is freely available for research purposes and may be downloaded from the authors' university site at http://crr.ugent.be/subtlex-nl or from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.