Storage and retrieval of low-frequency words*

Retneval of words as a function of their language frequency was studied by having Ss attempt to recogruze the words, recall the words after one presentation, or produce (think of) the words from their initial bigrams. It was found that one reason many low-frequency words could not be thought of (often necessary in anagram and other problem-solving tasks) was because they were not stored by S. as measured by failure to recognize them as words. Those low-frequency words that were stored were more difficult to retrieve than high-frequency words, both in production and in recall. High-frequency words did not exhibit failure of storage. but showed considerable difficulty in retrieval. both in recall and in production.