Monday, October 15, 2007

Frequency effects in linguistics

For the record, there are known to be a variety of “frequency effects” in language. A brief survey:

Zipf's law: roughly speaking, the most frequent word in a corpus will be about twice as frequent as the second most frequent (i.e., twice as many tokens).

Word recognition: Dahan et al (pdf) :“frequency affects the earliest moments of lexical access”

Sentence processing: Lau et al : Frequency effects “give rise to reaction time differences in sentence processing tasks"

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TV Linguistics - Pronouncify.com and the fictional Princeton Linguistics department

 [reposted from 11/20/10] I spent Thursday night on a plane so I missed 30 Rock and the most linguistics oriented sit-com episode since ...