Lexique Manual

Lexique 3 Manual

How to cite Lexique

New, B., Pallier, C., Brysbaert, M., Ferrand, L. (2004) Lexique 2: A New French Lexical Database. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 36 (3), 516-524. doi.org/10.3758/bf03195598 

New B., Pallier C., Ferrand L., Matos R. (2001) A lexical database of contemporary French on the internet: LEXIQUE, L’Année Psychologique, 101, 447-462.  doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01396-2 

Lexique-Infra

Gimenes, M., Perret, C., & New, B. (2020). Lexique-Infra: grapheme-phoneme, phoneme-grapheme regularity, consistency, and other sublexical statistics for 137,717 polysyllabic French words. Behavior Research Methods. doi.org/10.3758/s13428-020-01396-2 

Online searches

Some searches can be performed online thanks to dynamic tables. If needed, explanations are available in the Online search manual.

For “pattern” searches, it is essential to know the regular expression syntax.

Offline searches with R or Python

To perform some complex queries, or to keep a trace of your criteria when selecting experimental material, rather than using the online search interfaces, it is strongly recommended to use scripts, for example in R or Python on your computer. We have written a few documents to help you: “How to query Lexique with R?” and “How to query Lexique with Python?”.

To install and automatically access OpenLexicon tables with R, notably Lexique, you can use the following code:

source('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/chrplr/openlexicon/master/datasets-info/fetch_datasets.R')
lexique <- get_lexique383_rds()  # downloads the Lexique table

The functions defined in fetch_datasets.R allow you to download the tables and keep local copies.

Offline searches with a spreadsheet (Excel, …)

You can also download the tables and use a spreadsheet such as Excel or OpenOffice Calc. The file Lexique.zip contains a version of the database in Excel format (.xlsx) and the Openlexicon databases are available in .tsv (tab separated values) or .csv (comma separated values) formats. These can easily be imported into OpenOffice Calc (File/Open/format=csv) or into Excel (see How to open a .tsv file in Excel)

To perform searches in a data table with a spreadsheet like Excel or OpenOffice Calc, you can use, for example, the Vlookup function. It is also possible, and more flexible, to use the Index and Match functions described in the following tutorials, which show how to look up items in a spreadsheet from a list

Construction of Lexique and related resources