The subjective familiarity of English homophones

Abstract

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

Neighborhood density effects in spoken word recognition in Spanish

“…In Spanish, like in English, words that occur often in the language tended to be similar to many words, whereas words that occur less often are similar to fewer words. The frequency with which a word occurred in Spanish was also positively correlated with the subjective familiarity rating of that word (r = 0.28), replicating previous studies in English (cf., Begg, & Rowe, 1972;Gernsbacher, 1984;Kreuz, 1987).The results of the present analyses showed that the relationships among familiarity, word frequency, neighborhood density, and word length found in other languages (e.g., Frauenfelder et al, 1993; Yoneyama, & Johnson, 2001) are also found in Spanish. Finding the same relationships among these variables is somewhat surprising, given a difference in typical word length between English and Spanish.…”

“…In Spanish, like in English, words that occur often in the language tended to be similar to many words, whereas words that occur less often are similar to fewer words. The frequency with which a word occurred in Spanish was also positively correlated with the subjective familiarity rating of that word (r = 0.28), replicating previous studies in English (cf., Begg, & Rowe, 1972;Gernsbacher, 1984;Kreuz, 1987).…”

Remembering with and without awareness in a depressed mood: Evidence of deficits in initiative.

“…Homophones were chosen from a list compiled by Kreuz (1987) and submitted to an independent group of 20 subjects for ratings of emotionality. Subjects rated both meanings of the homophones, as well as nonhomophones, on a scale of 1 (not at al l emo tional) to 7 (extremely emotional).…”

On the norming of homophones

“…In particular, although print frequency measures have often been employed as a measure of dominance, the intercorrelations reported in Table 2 suggest that this approach can be seriously misleading, because the print frequency measures are not as highly correlated with the present measures as the latter measures are with each other. The subjective familiarity judgments reported by Kreuz (1987) fare much better as predictors of dominance. For the 66 homophone pairs common to the studies of Galbraith and Taschman (1969), Gorfein and O'Brien (1985), Kreuz (1987), and the present study, the obtained correlation of the ratio of the rated familiarity measure for each of the two forms of a homophone obtained by Kreuz (dominant familiarity/secondary familiarity) and the averWe next consider the power of the present variables in predicting the lexical decision and naming time data from the English Lexicon Project .…”

“…The subjective familiarity judgments reported by Kreuz (1987) fare much better as predictors of dominance. For the 66 homophone pairs common to the studies of Galbraith and Taschman (1969), Gorfein and O'Brien (1985), Kreuz (1987), and the present study, the obtained correlation of the ratio of the rated familiarity measure for each of the two forms of a homophone obtained by Kreuz (dominant familiarity/secondary familiarity) and the averWe next consider the power of the present variables in predicting the lexical decision and naming time data from the English Lexicon Project . Table 5 contains the proportions of variance accounted for by each of the present measures: cued spelling, sentence acceptability, word association, and uncued spelling (once again, with word length, orthographic N, and HAL frequency partialed out from the analysis).…”