The German Lexicon Project

The German Lexicon Project (GLP) is a new, collaborative initiative for collecting large-scale lexical decision data for German words. The GLP is modeled on successful examples such as the English (Balota et al., 2007), Dutch (Keuleers et al., 2010), and British (Keuleers et al., 2012) Lexicon Projects and aims to create an open, high-quality resource for the psycholinguistic research community.

As a core group that emerged from the DFG network TRUST, we developed stimuli and programmed an online experiment that is hosted by Humboldt University in Berlin. In preparing the study, we followed the guidelines that were created by the TRUST network. Data collection started in December 2025 and is currently ongoing. The progress of data collection can be tracked here: https://github.com/schiekiera/German_Lexicon_Multilab_Monitoring.

When complete, the resulting open dataset will contain behavioral data from over a thousand participants, providing a robust resource to address fundamental questions about lexical, orthographic, and semantic processing in German.

GLP data collection so far.

If the project has sparked your interest and you would like to be part of it, there is still time to join data collection (either this current wave or future ones). We are currently especially interested in labs that can recruit German-speaking participants from South Germany, Austria or Switzerland.

Some important things to know:

• The experiment can be conducted entirely online.
• Participating groups will be acknowledged as co-authors in the final data set and accompanying publications. We aim to recruit at least 50 participants per location in order to reach our goal of at least 1,440 participants.
• Unfortunately, we are unable to offer financial support.

You can contact Tanja Römbke (tanja.roembke@psych.rwth-aachen.de) or Jana Hasenäcker (jana.hasenaecker@uni-erfurt.de) for more information.