A number of resources provide psycholinguistic researchers with information about the words that the typical child or adult knows in a variety of languages. What has until presently not been available is a resource that provides information about the words that a typical adult learning a second/foreign language knows. Given the popularity of learning the Spanish language in the United States, we created such a resource--The Beginning Spanish Lexicon--and have used it to explore various questions about foreign language learning. We are now making this resource freely available to language researchers on this web site. The effort to make this resource available to the research community was supported in part by  grants from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health (R01 DC 006472 and P30 DC005803 to the University of Kansas). Thanks to the Digital and Electrical Engineering Core (DEEC) of the Center for Biobehavioral Neurosciences in Communication Disorders (BNCD) for making this resource available to the research community on their server.
 

A detailed description of how to use the Beginning Spanish Lexicon (BSL), how to interpret the output, and a list of the computer readable transcription (and the IPA equivalents) required as input to the BSL can be found in the paper below. If you use the BSL in your research, please be sure to cite this article:

Furthermore, I would greatly appreciate receiving a reprint (electronic or hard copy) of any published work that uses the Beginning Spanish Lexicon. Reprints may be sent to:

              Michael Vitevitch
              Department of Psychology
              1415 Jayhawk Blvd.
              University of Kansas
              Lawrence, KS 66045

              OR via e-mail: mvitevit@ku.edu