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Word Frequency Differences

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In everyday conversation, there are words that people use quite frequently and words that are used infrequently, which has been described as Word Frequency (WF). For example, the word cow has a higher frequency, because it utilized more often in everyday conversation, novels, magazine, newspaper, and academia than the word tungsten, which is less used (Davies, 2012). Andrews (1989) argued that based on this concept of WF, NS has an effect only with words that have a low WF. Explained further, the more neighbors that a low frequency word has, the longer it takes for one to attain mental activation for word recognition (Andrews, 1992). Furthermore it is argued that WF has more to do with word recognition than NS effect, because it is shown that …show more content…

It was found that regardless of the frequency of the target word, the greater WF difference that the neighbor word has compared to the target word, the longer the delay in word determination that occurs (Grainger et al., 1989). In addition, it was found that the larger the amount of these higher frequency neighbors that the target has, the longer the delay of the neighborhood word (Grainger et al., 1989). However, studies done by Sears et al. (2006) showed no such high frequency neighbor effect when the study was replicated in English. The reasons for such disparity is that each language might have different word characteristic, for example English words tend to be shorter on average than French, German, or Spanish, which can have more neighbor words, which affects word determination time (Sears et al. 2006; Wimmer, Köhler, Grotjahn, & Altmann,

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