Nagy (1988) states that vocabulary is a prerequisite factor in comprehension. Drawing upon a reductionist approach and having in mind the prospects for material development, this study aimed at creating an English for Academic Purposes Word List (EAPWL). The corpus of this study was compiled from a corpus containing 6479 pages of texts, 2,081,678 million tokens (running words) and 63825 types (...

The present work examined the relationships among familiarity ratings, frequency of occurrence, neighborhood density, and word length in a corpus of Spanish words. The observed relationships were similar to the relationships found among the same variables in English. An auditory lexical decision task was then performed to examine the influence of word frequency, neighborhood density, and neighb...

We introduce Cro36WSD, a freely-available medium-sized lexical sample for Croatian word sense disambiguation (WSD). Cro36WSD comprises 36 words: 12 adjectives, 12 nouns, and 12 verbs, balanced across both frequency bands and polysemy levels. We adopt the multi-label annotation scheme in the hope of lessening the drawbacks of discrete sense inventories and obtaining more realistic annotations fr...

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization of word meanings over the semantic space, which...

Thai has an alphabetic script with a distinctive feature - it has no spaces between words. Since previous research with spaced alphabetic systems (e.g., English) has suggested that readers use spaces to guide eye movements, it is of interest to investigate what physical factors might guide Thai readers' eye movements. Here the effects of word-initial and word-final position-specific character f...

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 lexi...

Estes and Maddox (2002) suggested that the word frequency mirror effect in episodic recognition memory might be due to word likeness rather than to the frequency of experience with a word per se. We examined their suggestion using a factorial manipulation of frequency and neighborhood density, a measure used in lexical memory research to measure orthographic word likeness. For study with no spe...

Current models of word production offer different accounts of the representation of homophones in the lexicon. The investigation of how the homophone status of a word affects lexical access can be used to test theories of lexical processing. In this study, homophones appeared as word distractors superimposed on pictures that participants named orally. The authors varied distractor frequency, a ...

The effect of word frequency on semantic processing was characterized by studying two groups of right-handed participants using fMRI. Stimuli were presented in blocks of either high frequency or low frequency word triplets where a sample word appeared above a pair of test words. One group (n = 8) made semantic judgments by selecting the word from the test pair that was more closely associated w...

This study investigated the relationship between the contextual probability of lexical items in spontaneous speech, as measured by the Cloze procedure, and word frequency. It also attempted to determine the relative importance of the two variables in causing delay, in the form of hesitation, in the production of spontaneous speech. The analysis revealed that content words of low contextual prob...