The authors studied the vocabulary of speech and writing of 45 college students to develop a list of the 25 most frequent words and to compare this list with similar lists by earlier investigators. They used a type-token ratio to aid determination of the similarities and differences between spoken and written vocabularies. Nineteen of the 25 words…

This study consisted of two experiments. In the first experiment, 40 college students gave frequency ratings for concrete and abstract words which were equated on normative frequency. From the results it was concluded that abstract (low imagery) words, even though the two sets of words are of equal frequency. In the second experiment, different…

This word count is a composite listing of the different words spoken by a selected sample of 54 English-speaking adults and the frequency with which each of the different words was used in a particular test. The stimulus situation was identical for each subject and consisted of 20 cards of the Thematic Apperception Test. Although most word counts…

In the first of three experiments, university undergraduates were presented a list of 300 words and 100 nonwords in two sessions. Their confidence that an item was a word was indicated for each item on a six-point scale. This experiment demonstrated the feasibility of creating a recognition test of vocabulary. In Experiment 2, 100 items were…

The two experiments reported here examined the effects on judgments of frequency of three independent variables: presentation frequency, spacing of repetitions, and orienting task. (Author)

Traces the development of discourse analysis in modern linguistics, and presents a semantic analysis, based on a comparative word frequency count, of two political speeches made by the socialist Jean Jaures. (AM)

Hypothesizes that cloze easiness is a measure of information and tests this theory against a reanalysis of earlier data on cloze test performance. (AA)

Examines the original validity of the 220-word Dolch Basic Sight Vocabulary, compiled in 1936, and considers whether it accounts for a large percentage of words in current reading usage. (BF)

Reviews aspects of the relationship between machine learning and information retrieval. Highlights include learning programs that extend from knowledge-sparse learning to knowledge-rich learning; the role of the thesaurus; knowledge bases; artificial intelligence; weighting documents; work frequency; and merging classification structures. (78…

The relationship between word frequency and reading vocabulary was investigated, with particular attention to the lognormal model of word frequency distribution and the concept of family frequency. Subjects were 576 elementary and secondary school students. The effects of grade, ability, and gender were also investigated. Results are discussed.…

Two word/nonword decision experiments were carried out to investigate differences in reading between congenitally blind children reading Braille and sighted children dealing with print. Three aspects of single-word recognition were studied: semantic processing, word frequency effects, and phonological recoding. (Author/RH)

The relationship between word difficulty, measured by morphological family frequency counts, and passage comprehension was examined. Fifth graders read either a high-frequency or low-frequency version of a social studies passage. Literal and inferential comprehension was measured revealing no significant differences in comprehension of the two…

Describes an investigation into the relationship of schizophrenic thought disorder to measures of repetition that include phrase units, proximity of repetitions, and word frequencies to determine whether such measures distinguish schizophrenics from non-schizophrenics and to what extent they are associated with certain attributes of schizophrenia,…