Frequency Effects in Processing Inflected Dutch Nouns: A Distributed Connectionist Account

Words that occur more frequently in language are processed more quickly. This is the longest-standing, and most clearly established result in experimental psycholinguistics (for early summaries of research on word frequency, see Howes and Soloman 1951; Broadbent 1967; Morton 1969). This basic result has been replicated in a range of tasks, such as reading aloud, picture naming, semantic or lexical decisions, in a range of languages. The word frequency effect is taken as evidence that the systems involved in language processing respond to basic statistical properties of an individual’s linguistic experience. Furthermore, through careful manipulations of different word properties, it has been possible to observe effects of the frequency of individual morphemes in complex words (Taft 1979; Sereno and Jongman 1997; Baayen, Dijkstra, and Schreuder, 1997) or effects of the frequency of different meanings of homonymous words (Borowsky and Masson 1996; Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen-Wilson 2002) in order to infer which aspects of word frequency are crucial for a particular task. However, despite widespread agreement that word frequency plays an important role in language processing, a variety of accounts have been proposed of the mechanism by which frequency effects arise. It has been proposed that word frequency effects arise since access to the mental lexicon involves a search through a frequency-ordered word list (in the search model of Forster 1976). Alternatively, it is proposed that changes to the processing properties of the units that represent individual lexical items (such as lowering the threshold for recognition in the logogen model of Morton 1969 or raising the resting activation level in the interactiveactivation model of word recognition proposed by McClelland and Rumelhart 1981) allows high frequency words to be recognised more quickly.