Word frequency and lexical class distinction between function and content words have been shown to significantly influence word production. In this paper, we use real-time magnetic resonance imaging to investigate the effect of word frequency and lexical class on articulatory characteristics (the articulator speed) as well as acoustic characteristics (F0 and short-term energy) in word productio...

The present study aims to isolate the locus of the frequency effect within the spoken word recognition architecture. By applying the additive factors logic (Sternberg, 1969) to an auditory lexical decision task where both word frequency and stimulus quality were factorially manipulated, the reaction time data can be analyzed to study processing stages along the time course of spoken word recogn...

Recent work on automatically predicting the predominant sense of a word has proven to be promising (McCarthy et al., 2004). It can be applied (as a first sense heuristic) to Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) tasks, without needing expensive hand-annotated data sets. Due to the big skew in the sense distribution of many words (Yarowsky and Florian, 2002), the First Sense heuristic for WSD is often...

Three experiments examine the syllable-frequency effect during visual word recognition in Spanish. Disyllabic words and pseudowords were employed manipulating the positional frequency of the first and the second syllable as well as the word frequency (only for words). A standard lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and a temporal separation technique (Experiments 2 & 3), in which either the fir...

The present study examined word frequency effects on implicit priming in older adults compared with younger adults. In Experiment 1 participants performed a spelling test consisting of primed and unprimed homophones (e.g., mourning) and nonhomophones (e.g., militant). Older adults spelled more unprimed, low-frequency homophones than did younger adults, suggesting that there are age-related diff...

The relative abilities of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness to predict accuracy of spoken word recognition in noise were compared using two data sets. Word frequency is the number of times a word appears in a corpus of text. Contextual diversity is the number of different documents in which the word appears in that corpus. Semantic distinctiveness takes into acc...

The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent demonstration that word niche is a strong determinant of future rise or fall in word frequency, here we introduce a model that allows us to distinguish persiste...

Word frequencies play important roles in a variety of NLP-related applications. Word frequency estimation for Chinese is a big challenge due to characteristics of Chinese, in particular word-formation and word segmentation. This paper concerns the issue of word frequency estimation in the condition that we only have a Chinese wordlist and a raw Chinese corpus with arbitrarily large size, and do...

The combined contributions of word age of acquisition (AoA) and word frequency (rated and objective) to word retrieval speed and accuracy were investigated, using a picture-naming paradigm. Results from two fully factorial studies revealed that both AoA and word frequency reliably facilitate the speed and accuracy of word retrieval. Furthermore, word frequency and AoA interacted across delay (0...

Preview benefits (PBs) from two words to the right of the fixated one (i.e., word N + 2) and associated parafoveal-on-foveal effects are critical for proposals of distributed lexical processing during reading. This experiment examined parafoveal processing during reading of Chinese sentences, using a boundary manipulation of N + 2-word preview with low- and high-frequency words N + 1. The main ...