Don't Forget Recency Effects Too...

As usual, Mark Liberman, of Language Log fame, has some instructive comments about linguistics, frequency effects, recency effects, and the state of the art in psycholinguistics:

psychological research tells us that there is also a strong recency effect: in all sorts of tasks, words that we've heard or seen recently are processed more quickly. Again, we don't know how the recency effect arises in the brain, nor do we know whether the brain mechanisms underlying the frequency and recency effects are the partly or entirely the same. There is no lack of speculation on these questions, but we honestly just don't know at this point.