Are Schalter and šapka good competitors? Searching for stimuli for an investigation of the Russian- German bilingual mental lexicon Christina Clasmeier, Tanja Anstatt, Jessica Ernst & Eva Belke Abstract: Journal articles on language processing rarely comment on the dif- ficulties and obstacles involved in the construction of materials for experi- mental investigations. This is remarkable, since the compilation of appropri- ate (i.e., valid and well-controlled) linguistic stimuli is one of the biggest challenges in psycholinguistic research. This is particularly true for lan- guages other than English. This paper addresses a number of methodological issues that arose during the preparation of material for an eye-tracking inves- tigation of the Russian-German bilingual mental lexicon. As we intended to study intra- and interlingual co-activation, quadruples of two Russian and two German words with a phonological overlap in the onset were needed. Thus, we discuss the concept of phonological overlap and consider the pho- netic and phonological differences between Russian and German. Further- more, word frequency is known to be a crucial factor in language processing. However, several problems are associated with the concept of frequency in general and with comparing frequency data from two languages. We broach this issue in the final section of this paper, presenting and discussing fre- quency data of different types. Lastly, we discuss how we guaranteed that the pictures we used were reliably associated with the intended object names in each language, which is a critical pre-condition for materials intended to be used in the visual-world paradigm. 1 Introduction Psycholinguistics is a genuinely empirical discipline, involving the examina- tion of language from the perspective of its users. Key research questions in the field concern how language is represented in the brain and which access procedures are in place to retrieve these representations when encoding and decoding utterances. The choice of linguistic material is critical to the validi- ty of psycholinguistic research, and the success of a study is highly depen- dent on the quality of the linguistic items that participants are confronted with. Fortunately, most authors provide a list of the materials they used in the Appendix, which offers readers insights into how the experimental de-