EsPal: one-stop shopping for Spanish word properties
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Updated: May 13, 2026

Universal Screening for Prevention of Reading, Writing, and Math Disabilities in Spanish
Published on: July 18, 2020
Andrew Duchon1, Manuel Perea, Nuria Sebastián-Gallés
1Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language, Donostia, Spain, a.duchon@bcbl.eu.
Abstract:
This article introduces EsPal: a Web-accessible repository containing a comprehensive set of properties of Spanish words. EsPal is based on an extensible set of data sources, beginning with a 300 million token written database and a 460 million token subtitle database. Properties available include word frequency, orthographic structure and neighborhoods, phonological structure and neighborhoods, and subjective ratings such as imageability. Subword structure properties are also available in terms of bigrams and trigrams, biphones, and bisyllables. Lemma and part-of-speech information and their corresponding frequencies are also indexed. The website enables users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on the properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be added over time as they become available. It is freely available from the following website: http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/espal/ .
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