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Differences in the responses of an elderly biracial group of cognitively normal subjects to a 15-item short version of the Boston Naming Test developed for the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) were examined. The subjects consisted of 103 Whites and 136 African Americans who were 70 years of age and older and living in a five-county urban and rural area of North Carolina. They were drawn from the Duke University site of the Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (EPESE). All were cognitively normal. With gender, years of education, and age controlled, White subjects performed significantly better than did African American subjects. The items in this test were selected to represent words with a high, medium, and low frequency of occurrence in English. They did not, however, show the expected gradation for either racial group. Medium and low frequency items were of comparable difficulty for the two races. Hierarchical ordering of difficulty would be improved with minor rearrangement of items.
Differences in the responses of an elderly biracial group of cognitively normal subjects to a 15-item short version of the Boston Naming Test developed for the Consortium to Establish a Registry for Alzheimer's Disease (CERAD) were examined. The subjects consisted of 103 Whites and 136 African Americans who were 70 years of age and older and living in a five-county urban and rural area of North Carolina. They were drawn from the Duke University site of the Established Populations for Epidemiologic Studies of the Elderly (EPESE). All were cognitively normal. With gender, years of education, and age controlled, White subjects performed significantly better than did African American subjects. The items in this test were selected to represent words with a high, medium, and low frequency of occurrence in English. They did not, however, show the expected gradation for either racial group. Medium and low frequency items were of comparable difficulty for the two races. Hierarchical ordering of difficulty would be improved with minor rearrangement of items.
College students rated 828 homophonic words (words with the same pronunciation but different spellings) in terms of subjective familiarity. High interrater reliability was obtained, and the ratings correlated well with other published familiarity measures (r=.85). The familiarity ratings also correlated highly with log transforms of Ku (!era and Francis's (1967) printed frequency measures (r=.75). However, many words of equal log frequency varied widely in rated familiarity, and vice versa. To determine which of these two factors was the better predictor of verbal performance, we orthogonally varied the two in a lexical decision task and found that, for words of moderate frequency, rated familiarity was by far the better predictor. We conclude that even though printed frequency and rated familiarity generally covary, printed frequency is a less reliable index of the underlying psychological construct, word familiarity.Many researchers have tried to explain word-sample of the language and therefore is subject to samrecognition effects by placing heavy emphasis on the role pIing error. Gernsbacher (1983) demonstrated that lowof word frequency (e.g., Forster & Bednall, 1976; Mor-frequency words vary a great deal in terms of subjective ton, 1969; Oldfield & Wingfield, 1965; Pierce, 1963). familiarity and that many inconsistencies in the wordDespite the theoretical and experimental importance of recognition literature can be attributed to this confound this factor, few researchers have explicitly described what (Gernsbacher, 1984). When familiarity ratings are subthey mean when they refer to the frequency of a word. stituted for printed frequency ratings, these inconsistenMost psychologists who work in this area have simply cies are resolved. relied on one of the several indexes that have been comTwo recent studies provide further evidence that subpiled to measure how frequently a word appears in printed jective familiarity is a better predictor of word-recognition English. latencies than are printed frequency counts. Both Gordon Although printed frequency is one measure of how (1985) and Nusbaum, Pisoni, and Davis (1984), utilizfamiliar a word is to people, it may not be the best mea-ing different procedures, found that familiarity ratings acsure for use in psychological research. The Teacher's counted for more of the variance in reaction times than
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