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Updated: Oct 10, 2026

Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese
Published on: April 1, 2016
The attentional control of lexical processing pathways: reversing the word frequency effect
D A Balota1, M B Law, J D Zevin
1Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA. dbalota@artsci.wustl.edu
Abstract:
In two experiments, we investigated the influence of word frequency in speeded word naming and in a relatively novel regularization task in which participants were required to pronounce words on the basis of spelling-to-sound correspondences instead of giving their normal pronunciations (e.g., pronounce pint so that it rhymes with hint). Participants were presented high- and low-frequency regular words and exception words, along with a set of nonwords. The results indicated that there was a normal word frequency effect (i.e., high-frequency words faster than low-frequency words) in the standard speeded naming task, whereas, for the regularization task, the word frequency effect was reversed for regular words, even though the regular words were pronounced in an identical fashion in both the normal naming and the regularization tasks. This reversal of the word frequency effect was not obtained for the exception words. The discussion focuses on the implication of these results for attentional control models of lexical processing.
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