Abstract
Subjects making lexical decisions are reliably faster in responding to high-frequency words than to low-frequency words. This is known as the word frequency effect. We wished to demonstrate that some portion of this effect was due to frequency differences between words rather than to other dimensions correlated with word frequency. Three groups of subjects (10 engineers, 10 nurses, and I0 law students) made lexical decisions about 720 items, half words and half nonwords, from six different categories (engineering, medical, low-frequency nontechnical, medium-frequency nontechnical, and two groups of high-frequency nontechnical). Results of two analyses of variance revealed a crossover interaction such that engineers were faster in responding to engineering words than to medical words, whereas nurses were faster in responding to medical words than to engineering words. The engineering and medical words were equally long and equally infrequent by standard word counts. We take this as support for a frequency-based component in the word frequency effect. The practical implications of this research for estimating the readability of technical text are discussed.
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This research was supported jointly by AT&T Bell Laboratories and a grant to the first author from the Graduate School of Education of the University of Utah. The first experiment was conducted while the first author was a summer research fellow at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ. The authors wish to thank Dennis Egan, Peter Dixon, and Jerry Billington of AT&T Bell Laboratories, as well as John Cartan of the University of Utah, for their help with various aspects of this study.
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Gardner, M.K., Rothkopf, E.Z., Lapan, R. et al. The word frequency effect in lexical decision: Finding a frequency-based component. Memory & Cognition 15, 24–28 (1987). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197709
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03197709