The Qur'an Lexicon Project: A database of lexical statistics and phonotactic probabilities for 19, 286 contextually and phonetically transcribed types in Qur'anic Arabic

Reciting and memorizing the Qur’an forms a major part of religious practice for 1.6 billion Muslims around the world; in non-Arabic-speaking Muslim communities, it also provides Muslim speakers of other languages with their first exposure to the Arabic script and language. However, little research has been completed regarding the psycholinguistic processing of Qur’anic Arabic. In this paper, we present the first psycholinguistic database for Qur’anic Arabic, which comprises lexical variables (length: character, syllable, phone; frequency: item, syllable, biphone, phone; lexical uniqueness point, orthographic and phonological neighbourhood sizes, and orthographic and phonological Levenshtein distances) as well as phonotactic probabilities (positional segment and biphone) for 19,286 types that we contextually and phonetically transcribed based on Qur’anic recitation. This open-source resource will be useful for researchers studying Qur’anic Arabic lexical and phonological processing as well as for making systematic cross-linguistic comparisons that allow better delineation of language-specific and languagegeneral processes in language processing.