Welcome to the CLEARPOND Database

CLEARPOND is the Cross-Linguistic Easy-Access Resource for Phonological and Orthographic Neighborhood Densities.

CLEARPOND provides an interface for obtaining Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish phonological and orthographic neighborhood densities (or, PONDs).

Quick Guide for how to use CLEARPOND

CLEARPOND Features:

  • Search by neighborhood density and neighborhood frequency
  • Query within-language neighbors and foreign-language neighbors
  • Choose output parameters by relevance
  • Acquire data for specific words for either single words or full word lists
  • Select stimuli within specific frequencies
  • Generate new lists to meet range of neighborhood size or lexical frequency
  • Apply multiple filters simultaneously
  • Calculate Bigram/Biphone probabilities for words and non-words
  • Calculate neighborhood information for non-words, and for words otherwise not found in the database
  • Search the database by phonology
  • Get the full range of cross-linguistic neighborhood information for all languages

The CLEARPOND Databases can be downloaded as tab-delimited TXT files for offline use:

  • Dutch - (ZIP)
  • English - (ZIP)
  • French - (ZIP)
  • German - (ZIP)
  • Spanish - (ZIP)

CLEARPOND was created by Viorica Marian, James Bartolotti, Sarah Chabal, and Anthony Shook, researchers in the Northwestern University Bilingualism and Psycholinguistics Research Group. 

For more information, you can read or download a copy of our manuscript, published in PLoS ONE, here:

If you have questions/comments, please:


Or, check the Frequently Asked Questions