Contemporary New Zealand English has distinctive pronunciations of three characteristic vowels. Did the evolution of these distinctive pronunciations occur in all words at the same time or were different words affected differently? We analyze the changing pronunciation of New Zealand English in a large set of recordings of speakers born over a 130 year period. We show that low frequency words w...

Preliminary results on a way to reduce terms for text categorization are presented. We have used the transition point; a frequency which splits the words of a text into high frequency words and low frequency words. Thresholds outcoming from document frequency of terms, Information Gain and χ were tested in combination with the transition point. A text categorization experiment based on Rocchio’...

An investigation was conducted to examine the effects of lexical difficulty on spoken word recognition among young normal-hearing and middle-aged and older listeners with hearing loss. Two word lists, based on the lexical characteristics of word frequency and neighborhood density and frequency (Neighborhood Activation Model [NAM]), were developed: (1) lexically "easy" words with high word frequ...

Two experiments investigated whether priming due to a match in just the onset between a masked prime and target is found with high-frequency target words. Forster and Davis (1991, Exp. 5) reported that the masked onset priming effect was absent for high-frequency words and used the finding to argue that the effect has its locus in the grapheme-phoneme mapping process that operates serially with...

The success of a mechanical translation should be measured in terms of the level of depth required by the situation. To determine whether a careful translation is desirable a rough scanning will suffice. The use of cover-words, high frequency words that may be substituted for low frequency words, in the output language is an essential part of this process. The preparation of trans-semantic freq...

Three experiments assessed the contributions of age-of-acquisition (AoA) and frequency to visual word recognition. Three databases were created from electronic journals in chemistry, psychology and geology in order to identify technical words that are extremely frequent in each discipline but acquired late in life. In Experiment 1, psychologists and chemists showed an advantage in lexical decis...

Closed class (determiners, pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions etc. ) and open class (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) words have different linguistic functions and have been proposed to be processed by different neural systems. Here, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded in young German-speaking subjects while they read closed class and open class words flashed upon a video-screen. ...

Pupillary responses were examined during a lexical decision task (LDT). Word frequency (high and low frequency words) and emotional valence (positive, neutral and negative words) were varied as experimental factors incidental to the subjects. Both variables significantly affected lexical decision performance and an interaction effect was observed. The behavioral results suggest that manipulatin...

This corpus-based study aimed at exploring the most frequently-used academic words in linguistics and compare the wordlist with the distribution of high frequency words in Coxhead’s Academic Word List (AWL) and West’s General Service List (GSL) to examine their coverage within the linguistics corpus. To this end, a corpus of 700 linguistics research articles (LRAC), consisting of approximately ...

Previous studies showed that a new word that is similar to many known words will be learned better than a new word that is similar to few known words (Storkel et al., 2006). In the present study we created novel words that were phonological neighbors to lexical hermits-or known words that do not have any phonological neighbors-that varied in frequency of occurrence. After several exposures, par...