This research studied the role of surface and cumulative word frequency in the processing and representation of morphologically complex suffixed words. Experiment 1 showed that auditory lexical decision times to suffixed words were influenced by their surface frequency. Experiments 2 and 3 showed a cumulative root frequency effect for highand low-surface-frequency suffixed words. Experiment 4 d...

On the example of the recent edition of the Frequency Dictionary of Czech we describe and explain some new general principles that should be followed for getting better results for practical uses of frequency dictionaries. It is mainly adopting average reduced frequency instead of absolute frequency for ordering items. The formula for calculation of the average reduced frequency is presented in...

Vocabulary is fundamental to reading. As elementary students cross over from learning to read into reading to learn, vocabulary knowledge becomes increasingly important. The massive amount of vocabulary a student must learn precludes large amounts of time spent on any single word (Carver 1994, Schwanenflugel et al. 1997), except perhaps for some words that the student will read and write many t...

Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An eye-movement experiment was conducted wherein the ef...

We establish the following characteristics of the task of perspective classification: (a) using term frequencies in a document does not improve classification achieved with absence/presence features; (b) for datasets allowing the relevant comparisons, a small number of top features is found to be as effective as the full feature set and indispensable for the best achieved performance, testifyin...

In this study we investigate vowel reduction and the role of some lexical factors in the production of vowels extracted from a corpus of French conversations. Vowel durations and spectral quality are examined with respect to 1. their interaction in the corpus, 2. the position of vowels in words, and 3. word frequency and word category. The analyses are conducted on vowels produced by 16 speaker...

A frequently replicated finding is that higher frequency words tend to be shorter and contain more strongly reduced vowels. However, little is known about potential differences in the articulatory gestures for high vs. low frequency words. The present study made use of electromagnetic articulography to investigate the production of two German vowels, [i] and [a], embedded in high and low freque...

In spontaneous speech, speakers sometimes replace a word they have just produced or started producing by another word. The present study reports that in these replacement repairs, low-frequency replaced words are more likely to be interrupted prior to completion than high-frequency words, providing support to the hypothesis that the production of high-frequency words is more automatic than the ...