materials

Levenshtein distance calculator

A small windows application to generate measures of orthographic typicality based on the Levenshtein distance. Given an arbitrary input lexicon, the score for each word reflects the mean distance from that word to the N orthographically closest other words in the lexicon. A slightly more detailed explanation can be found in the README file contained in the .zip archive. Further details and a comparison with a standard measure of orthographic neighorhood size (Coltheart's N) are in a forthcoming paper (Yarkoni, Balota, & Yap, in press).

OLD20 and PLD20 scores

Orthographic and phonological "Levenshtein distance 20" scores for words in the English Lexicon Project. OLD20 reflects the mean distance (in number of steps) from each word to the 20 closest Levenshtein neighbors in the lexicon. PLD20 is the phonological analog, and is computed on the Unisyn representation of ELP words. These measures account for substantially more variance in behavioral measures of lexical decision and pronunciation speed than existing measures such as Coltheart's N.