Frequency Characteristics of American Sign Language

T  factor affecting spoken language processing of individual words is the frequency of occurrence. For example, in a word recognition task, listeners respond more quickly to frequent words (e.g., dog) than to infrequent ones (e.g., hound; Kawamoto et al. ). Similarly, speakers make fewer errors when naming highfrequency words than low-frequency ones presented to only one visual field (Scott and Hellige ). A typical error that second language learners make involves replacing infrequent verbs with frequent ones (Lennon ). Word frequency also affects phonological and grammatical processing. For example, high-frequency words with grammatical suffixes (e.g., -ed, -ing) are processed as a single unit, but low-frequency words have to be broken down into parts during processing (Alegre and Gordon ). Frequency effects are so ubiquitous in language processing tasks that no peer-reviewed journal would accept a psycholinguistic study of a spoken language for publication if the study didn’t control for word frequency. Controlling for word frequency poses little problem to investigators using English stimuli because there are several resources that report word frequencies for English, such as Francis and Kučera’s () study of