The germination of the idea for this project occurred in 2009, during my first sabbatical, but neither Melvin nor I had the time to act on such a massive project (Qian Wen was still in secondary school, the equivalent of the American high school, at the time!). We finally bit the bullet in 2014, and secured a small seed fund to explore the feasibility and logistical needs of this endeavour. This culminated in a smaller megastudy published in Goh, Yap, Lau, Ng, and Tan (2016) “Semantic richness effects in spoken word recognition: A lexical decision and semantic categorisation megastudy” Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 976. The experience there was instrumental in planning the timeline and manpower requirements for the half-million-dollar grant that was secured in 2017 for the AELP.
We are extremely fortunate to have the superlative and talented Qian Wen join us for the big push. She single-mindedly transformed the project and ensured the completion of token acquisition and data collection within two years, with the help of a veritable army of student research assistants whom she hand-picked. For the last three semesters, during the height of the word identification and word recognition phases, our two labs (plus a spillover lab) were operating at maximum capacity. Participants from at least two cohorts of NUS students must have gone through our labs, and the AELP became well known on participant recruitment platforms.
The database that was but a dream a decade ago is now a reality, and we hope that you will find the tokens useful. Do have fun exploring the datasets, as much as we had fun (sometimes) conjuring it.