Results of a word association task administered to second and sixth grade children and adults suggest that whether the word association response is of the same or different form as the stimulus word is related to the word-count frequency of the stimulus and the participants age. (Author/KM)

The greatest fallacy of word counts, the author maintains, lies in the fact that advocates of frequency lists stress the high percentage without telling the whole truth. It has become common to pretend that a frequency list of 3,000 words covers 95 percent of the language, that it enables a person to speak and understand a foreign language by…

Latin terms and phrases are frequently used in genealogical writing; Latin comprises 45.9 percent of the entries. The types of Latin terms encountered and their frequencies are listed. (SW)

An experiment testing the assumption that committee and empirical approaches are needed to identify terms in thesaurus design found that the two strategies did not generate lists of terms. (KP)

The design of programs to search large document data bases is discussed with regard to the use of compression coding combined with adoption of word fragments as the basic language elements. An algorithm is described for determination of a set of almost equifrequent fragments. Its efficiency is tested. (23 references) (Author)

Explains Zipf's Law of Vocabulary Distribution (i.e., relationship between frequency of a word in a corpus and its rank), noting the discovery of the law, alternative forms, and literature relating to the search for a rationale for Zipf's Law. Thirty-eight references are cited. (EJS)

The study compared the relative benefits of word lists that were individualized for adolescent and adult subjects (N=10) using augmented communication to word lists selected from standard vocabulary sources. Findings indicated that individualized lists could represent a larger portion of the total communication sample in a relatively short list.…

Suggests that word length has a strong effect on visual word recognition. Examines the locus of the word-length effect by looking at the interacting pattern between word length and word frequency. Finds that some parts of the word-length effect and the word-frequency effect have the same locus. (SC)

When participants search for a target letter while reading, they make more omissions if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. Reflecting developmental changes in component language and literacy skills, the size of this effect increases with age. With adults, the missing-letter effect is due…

K. J. Malmberg, J. Holden, and R. M. Shiffrin (2004) reported more false alarms for low- than high-frequency words when the foils were similar to the targets. According to the source of activation confusion (SAC) model of memory, that pattern is based on recollection of an underspecified episodic trace rather than the error-prone familiarity…