Developing Multipic: A tool to promote research, educational assessment, and clinical intervention in lesser resourced languages (2025-)
Christos Pliatsikas, Marco Tamburelli (Bangor University), and Jon Andoni Duñabeitia (Universidad Nebrija)
British Academy Research Project
Multipic is a robust multilingual dataset designed for research in cognitive science, psycholinguistics, and AI, focusing on picture-naming across diverse languages. Launched in 2014, it has evolved to include 500 culturally neutral images with naming norms in 33 languages, with more currently in the pipeline. Multipic aids cross-linguistic studies of language processing, perception, and memory. Its structured, accessible format enables reliable cross-cultural comparisons while assisting in promoting research in under-represented languages. Moreover, Multipic has potential implications for educational and clinical practices, as it allows for the development of linguistic assessments and language therapy tools that do not currently exist in several languages. This project brings together researchers from around Europe who will expand Multipic by producing naming norms in eight lesser resourced languages, two each from four major linguistic families: Celtic (Scottish Gaelic, Cornish), Romance (Lombard, Emilian), Slavic (Silesian, Kashubian) and Germanic (Scots, Moselle-Franconian) . This expansion will enrich linguistic diversity in research and position Multipic as a valuable tool providing multilingual, cross-cultural insights with immediate theoretical and practical applications.
