Procura-PALavras (P-PAL) is a project funded by The Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) (PTDC/PSI-PCOed/104679/2008) that aims to design and provide a Web application that enables researchers in Cognitive Sciences, Neuroscience and Linguistics to quickly access a great number of indices in order to estimate the lexical and sublexical properties of about 60.000 lemmas and 200.000 wordforms in European Portuguese (EP).
P-PAL offers a wide variety of norms and statistics: frequency counts per million words and LOG10 frequencies for all lexical entries (lemmas and wordforms obtained from analysis and compilation of EP corpora), morphological and syntactic analysis (e.g. grammatical gender, number, part of speech); orthographic measures (e.g. extension, consonant-vowel structure, homography, uniqueness point and several bigram and trigram frequency statistics); phonologic measures (e.g. phonetic notation, phonologic extension, schwas and homophones, phonologic structure and several biphone frequency measures); phonographic measures (e.g. spelling-sound and sound-spelling regularity, spelling-sound consistency, number and list of consistent and inconsistent words as well as frequency of consistence and inconsistence); syllable measures (e.g. orthographic and phonological syllabification, stress patterns, type and token syllable frequency measures); neighborhood statistics (e.g. orthographic, phonological, phonographic and syllabic addition, substitution, deletion and transposition neighbors and their distribution according to letter position and word frequency). P-PAL will also provide lexical semantic indices, yet unavailable in EP databases (e.g. lexical ambiguity, semantic distance and co-occurrence). Finally P-PAL will also provide norms for subjective indices, namely imageability, concreteness, familiarity, valence, arousal and control, also still unavailable for EP or available only for a very limited vocabulary. P-PAL is therefore a primary tool for the promotion and internationalization of Portuguese research.