LASTU: A psycholinguistic search tool for Finnish lexical stimuli

Behav Res Methods. 2024 Feb 22. doi: 10.3758/s13428-024-02347-x. Online ahead of print.

Abstract

LASTU is a tool for searching for Finnish language stimulus words for psycholinguistic studies. The tool allows the user to query a number of properties, including forms, lemmas, frequencies, and morphological features. It also includes two new measures for quantifying lemma and form ambiguity. The tool is written in Python and is available for Windows and macOS platforms. It is available at https://osf.io/j8v6b/ . Included with the tool is a database based on a massive corpus of dependency-parsed Finnish language data crawled from the Internet (over 5 billion tokens). While LASTU has been developed for researchers working on the Finnish language, the openly available implementation can also be applied to other languages.

Keywords: Finnish; Frequency; Lexical variable; Orthographic neighborhood; Psycholinguistics; Software; Stimulus search.