Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Several studies show that lexical frequency influences linguistic processing and, when uncontrolled, can confound the results of psycholinguistic experiments. Given the scarcity of solid frequency data for sign languages, this study aims to know the subjective frequency of 277 signs of the Uruguayan Sign Language (LSU). The study is available online (its source code is publicly available) and allows the collection of frequency estimates. This tool was validated by running the experiment with Rioplatense Spanish words and comparing the estimates with measures of objective frequency based on corpora and reaction times observed in lexical decision tasks. The results will allow us to know the variation of frequency according to typical variables in psycholinguistic studies, such as region, age, and ethnicity, and according to variables more typical of sign language studies, such as the age of language acquisition, use of the language at home, and the educational background of the participants.