Word frequency books are compiled on the basis of common usage and aid language users to know which terms best communicate an idea. (Author)

The subjective magnitude estimation (SME) procedure was used to obtain estimates of relative word frequency from two adult groups (15 lexicographers, 13 other adults) for 60 words ranging widely in objective frequency. Lexicographers rendered more reliable estimates, and their averaged data correlated more highly with objective log frequency than…

To determine children's knowledge of the less frequent grammatical usages of words that may occur in more than one part of speech, lists of such words were developed. The grammatical functions of 1220 common words from two word counts were examined; about 50% were found to be grammatically ambiguous. Data were collected from about 1500 children in…

The publication next spring of the American Heritage Word Frequency Book and the American Heritage School Dictionary will mark a new advance in the technology of dictionary and word-frequency book construction. The use of high spped computers has enabled the compilers to analyze five million words from a body of materials frequently used in…

In three immediately succeeding trials, 45 young adults named 50 pictures of objects as rapidly as possible; word retrieval latencies were measured for each item. Before each trial, one experimental group was given information as to the word frequency (WF) level of the items' names. The other experimental group was given information as to the…