Towards a “DGS-LEX”: A roadmap for the collaborative creation of a psycholinguistic database for German Sign Language (DGS)

Lexical variables such as iconicity or age of acquisition are known to be important sources of variance in psycholinguistic experiments. To control for their influence, researchers working on German Sign Language (DGS) need to use stimuli rated for these variables (e. g., iconicity) by an independent group of participants before implementing their actual experiment. Up to now, several research groups have made such rating data publicly available, but a central resource is currently still lacking. Against this background, this short paper provides a roadmap for the collaborative creation of a so-called “DGS-LEX”, a lexical database for psycholinguistic research on DGS, similar to ASL-LEX. By integrating relevant data from different published and forthcoming studies, this joint effort aims to establish a new database for lexical variables in DGS primarily based upon subjective ratings. (Note: This paper is bilingual. The contents of the English and German versions are identical. The German version can be retrieved from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28282907. A summary in DGS is available from https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.28282898.)