Moving beyond Kucera and Francis: a critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English

Word frequency is the most important variable in research on word processing and memory. Yet, the main criterion for selecting word frequency norms has been the availability of the measure, rather than its quality. As a result, much research is still based on the old Kucera and Francis frequency norms. By using the lexical decision times of recently published megastudies, we show how bad this measure is and what must be done to improve it. In particular, we investigated the size of the corpus, the language register on which the corpus is based, and the definition of the frequency measure. We observed that corpus size is of practical importance for small sizes (depending on the frequency of the word), but not for sizes above 16-30 million words. As for the language register, we found that frequencies based on television and film subtitles are better than frequencies based on written sources, certainly for the monosyllabic and bisyllabic words used in psycholinguistic research. Finally, we found that lemma frequencies are not superior to word form frequencies in English and that a measure of contextual diversity is better than a measure based on raw frequency of occurrence. Part of the superiority of the latter is due to the words that are frequently used as names. Assembling a new frequency norm on the basis of these considerations turned out to predict word processing times much better than did the existing norms (including Kucera & Francis and Celex). The new SUBTL frequency norms from the SUBTLEXUS corpus are freely available for research purposes from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental, as well as from the University of Ghent and Lexique Web sites

On-line syntactic and semantic influences in reading revisited

This study is a follow-up to Pynte, New and Kennedy (2008), Journal of Eye Movement Research . 2(1):4, 1-11. A new series of multiple regression analyses were conducted on the French part of the Dundee corpus, using a new set of syntactic and semantic predictors. In line with our prior study, quite different patterns of results were obtained for function and content words. We conclude that syntactic processing operations during reading mainly concern function words and are carried out ahead of semantic processing

A multiple regression analysis of syntactic and semantic influences in reading normal text

Semantic and syntactic influences during reading normal text were examined in a series of multiple regression analyses conducted on a large-scale corpus of eyemovement data. Two measures of contextual constraints, based on the syntactic descriptions provided by Abeillé, Clément et Toussenel (2003) and one measure on semantic constraint, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, were included in the regression equation, together with a set of properties (length, frequency, etc.), known to affect inspection times. Both syntactic and semantic constraints were found to exert a significant influence, with less time spent inspecting highly constrained target words, relative to weakly constrained ones. Semantic and syntactic properties apparently exerted their influence independently from each other, as suggested by the lack of interaction

Assessing the Usefulness of Google Books’ Word Frequencies for Psycholinguistic Research on Word Processing

In this Perspective Article we assess the usefulness of Google's new word frequencies for word recognition research (lexical decision and word naming). We find that, despite the massive corpus on which the Google estimates are based (131 billion words from books published in the United States alone), the Google American English frequencies explain 11% less of the variance in the lexical decision times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) than the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies, based on a corpus of 51 million words from film and television subtitles. Further analyses indicate that word frequencies derived from recent books (published after 2000) are better predictors of word processing times than frequencies based on the full corpus, and that word frequencies based on fiction books predict word processing times better than word frequencies based on the full corpus. The most predictive word frequencies from Google still do not explain more of the variance in word recognition times of undergraduate students and old adults than the subtitle-based word frequencies

MultiPic: a standardized set of 750 drawings with norms for six European languages

Numerous studies in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics have used pictures of objects as stimulus materials. Currently, authors engaged in cross-linguistic work or wishing to run parallel studies at multiple sites where different languages are spoken must rely on rather small sets of black-and-white or colored line drawings. These sets are increasingly experienced as being too limited. Therefore, we constructed a new set of 750 colored pictures of concrete concepts. This set, MultiPic, constitutes a new valuable tool for cognitive scientists investigating language, visual perception, memory and/or attention in monolingual or multilingual populations. Importantly, the MultiPic databank has been normed in six different European languages (British English, Spanish, French, Dutch, Italian and German). All stimuli and norms are freely available at http://www.bcbl.eu/databases/multipi

Comparing Word Processing Times in Naming, Lexical Decision, and Progressive Demasking: Evidence from Chronolex

We report performance measures for lexical decision (LD), word naming (NMG), and progressive demasking (PDM) for a large sample of monosyllabic monomorphemic French words (N = 1,482). We compare the tasks and also examine the impact of word length, word frequency, initial phoneme, orthographic and phonological distance to neighbors, age-of-acquisition, and subjective frequency. Our results show that objective word frequency is by far the most important variable to predict reaction times in LD. For word naming, it is the first phoneme. PDM was more influenced by a semantic variable (word imageability) than LD, but was also affected to a much greater extent by perceptual variables (word length, first phoneme/letters). This may reduce its usefulness as a psycholinguistic word recognition task

MEGALEX:A megastudy of visual and auditory word recognition

Using the megastudy approach, we report a new database (MEGALEX) of visual and auditory lexical decision times and accuracy rates for tens of thousands of words. We collected visual lexical decision data for 28,466 French words and the same number of pseudowords, and auditory lexical decision data for 17,876 French words and the same number of pseudowords (synthesized tokens were used for the auditory modality). This constitutes the first large-scale database for auditory lexical decision, and the first database to enable a direct comparison of word recognition in different modalities. Different regression analyses were conducted to illustrate potential ways to exploit this megastudy database. First, we compared the proportions of variance accounted for by five word frequency measures. Second, we conducted item-level regression analyses to examine the relative importance of the lexical variables influencing performance in the different modalities (visual and auditory). Finally, we compared the similarities and differences between the two modalities. All data are freely available on our website ( https://sedufau.shinyapps.io/megalex/ ) and are searchable at www.lexique.org , inside the Open Lexique search engine

The emergence of automaticity in reading: effects of orthographic depth and word decoding ability on an adjusted Stroop measure

Abstract Aims How long does it take for word reading to become automatic? Does the appearance and development of automaticity differ as a function of orthographic depth (e.g. French vs. English)? These questions were addressed in a longitudinal study of English and French beginning readers. The study focused on automaticity as obligatory processing as measured in the Stroop test. Method Measures of decoding ability and the Stroop effect were taken at three time points during the first grade (and 2nd grade in the UK) in 84 children. The study was the first to adjust the classic Stroop effect for inhibition (of distracting colors). Results The adjusted Stroop effect was zero in the absence of reading ability, and it was found to develop in tandem with decoding ability. After a further control for decoding, no effects of age or orthography were found on the adjusted Stroop measure. Conclusion The results are in line with theories of the development of whole word recognition that emphasize the importance of the acquisition of the basic orthographic code

Differential processing of consonants and vowels in the auditory modality: A cross-linguistic study

International audienceFollowing the proposal by Nespor, Peña, and Mehler (2003) that consonants are more important in constraining lexical access than vowels, New, Araújo, and Nazzi (2008) demonstrated in a visual priming experiment that primes sharing consonants (jalu-JOLI) facilitate lexical access while primes sharing vowels do not (vobi-JOLI). The present study explores if this asymmetry can be extended to the auditory modality and whether language input plays a critical role as developmental studies suggest. Our experiments tested French and English as target languages and showed that consonantal information facilitated lexical decision to a greater extent than vocalic information, suggesting that the consonant advantage is independent of the language’s distributional properties. However, vowels are also facilitatory, in specific cases, with iambic English CVCV or French CVCV words. This effect is related to the preservation of the rhyme between the prime and the target (here, the final vowel), suggesting that the rhyme, in addition to consonant information and consonant skeleton information is an important unit in auditory phonological priming and spoken word recognition