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Related Experiment Videos

What is this thing called frequency?

D L Nelson1, C L McEvoy

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa 33620-8200, USA. nelson@luna.cas.usf.edu

Memory & Cognition
|August 18, 2000
PubMed
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Word frequency norms, commonly used to study long-term knowledge, may not reflect stronger word connections. This study found common words have more incoming connections, not necessarily stronger or more outgoing ones, impacting performance.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Psycholinguistics
  • Lexical Semantics

Background:

  • Printed word frequency is a common measure for long-term knowledge's influence on performance.
  • The precise nature of what word frequency norms measure, particularly regarding word associations, remains unclear.
  • Frequency may implicitly reflect word co-occurrence and contextual connections.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate the underlying mechanisms of word frequency effects.
  • To test the hypothesis that high-frequency words possess stronger associative connections to other words.
  • To determine if word frequency influences performance due to associative network properties.

Main Methods:

  • Conducted a large-scale free association study to map word connections.

Related Experiment Videos

  • Performed extralist cued recall experiments to assess word cue effectiveness.
  • Analyzed word concreteness and the number/strength of word associates.

    • Main Results:

    • Common words are more concrete but do not necessarily have more or stronger associates.
    • High- and low-frequency words demonstrated equal effectiveness as cues when other attributes were controlled.
    • Common words exhibit more connections originating from other words, including associates.

    Conclusions:

    • Word frequency's influence on performance is not solely attributable to stronger or more numerous associative connections.
    • Free association tasks serve as a valid measure of associative strength.
    • The findings challenge existing models (e.g., SAM) suggesting frequency effects stem from associative network density.