Using Internet search engines to estimate word frequency

Blair, Irene V.; Urland, Geoffrey R.; Jennifer, E.

doi:10.3758/bf03195456

Cited by 70 publications

(47 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Four of the selected taboo words are not found in the traditional word norms. However, Blair, Urland, and Ma (2002) have shown that Internet search engines produce results comparable to those of Ku era and Francis's (1967) norms. Furthermore, they reported that among the search engines, Alta Vista was most highly correlated with the Ku era and Francis norms.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emotional memory effect: Differential processing or item distinctiveness?

Schmidt

Saari

2007

Mem Cogn

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A color-naming task was followed by incidental free recall to investigate how emotional words affect attention and memory. We compared taboo, nonthreatening negative-affect, and neutral words across three experiments. As compared with neutral words, taboo words led to longer color-naming times and better memory in both within-and between-subjects designs. Color naming of negative-emotion nontaboo words was slower than color naming of neutral words only during block presentation and at relatively short interstimulus intervals (ISIs). The nontaboo emotion words were remembered better than neutral words following blocked and random presentation and at both long and short ISIs, but only in mixed-list designs. Our results support multifactor theories of the effects of emotion on attention and memory. As compared with neutral words, threatening stimuli received increased attention, poststimulus elaboration, and benefit from item distinctiveness, whereas nonthreatening emotional stimuli benefited only from increased item distinctiveness.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The emotional memory effect: Differential processing or item distinctiveness?

Schmidt

Saari

2007

Mem Cogn

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“…The search engine returns the number of hits for the word, summing over its various case-inflected forms, unlike search engines such as Google, which did so for the most common Russian words but not for less frequent ones (at least this was the case when the experiment was run and the frequencies were obtained). The technique of using search engines for frequency estimates is discussed by Blair et al (2002). There are a few Zasorina (1977), Sharoff (2005), and the Russian National Corpus (RNC), but they do not include a wide range of compound words.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gradient clash, faithfulness, and sonority sequencing effects in Russian compound stress

Gouskova¹,

Roon

2013

Laboratory Phonology

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Russian normally does not have secondary stress, but it is variably realized in compounds. We examined the factors that contribute to secondary stress realization in a rating study, where listeners were asked to rate compounds pronounced without secondary stress and with secondary stress in various locations. We refine some generalizations from impressionistic descriptions: in compounds whose left-hand stems have mobile lexical stress, acceptability of secondary stress decreases with token frequency of the compound, and acceptability of pronunciations without stress increases with frequency. Ratings improve as distance between stresses increases, and this effect is gradient rather than categorical. We also identify new generalizations about secondary stress that relates to the properties of the left-hand stem. First, we identify a faithfulness effect: stress realization is optional on lexically stressed stems, but stress movement is strongly penalized. Second, we identify a sonority sequencing effect: secondary stress is not tolerated well on linker vowels in compounds, but acceptability improves significantly when the linker is the only vowel in a stem with a falling sonority cluster. Thus, the stress system distinguishes clusters with falling sonority from other types.

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“…One hypothesis is that, although the (unX )able meaning is generally the dominant meaning, the unX word may sometimes be fairly infrequent and thus neither meaning may be dominant for those words. Frequency counts from standard databases seemed quite unreliable (e.g., unwrap was not a word in a major corpus), so instead we used the number of Google hits as the frequency measure (Blair, Urland, & Ma, 2002); the median value for the unX words was 842,000, and they ranged from 34,800 to 33,500,000 (see Table 5). The log of this frequency explained a sizeable amount of the variability between items in the gopast measures.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context

Pollatsek

Drieghe

Stockall

et al. 2010

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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88Most research on the role of morphology in word recognition has been focused on whether morphemic analysis is involved in visual word identification. We think that the bulk of the evidence indicates that the answer is yes. For example, in isolated word recognition (e.g., Taft, 1988;Taft & Forster, 1975), the frequency of the root of a prefixed or suffixed English word influences lexical decision time (when the frequency of the whole word is controlled). Similarly, in sentence contexts, the frequency of the root of an English prefixed word (Niswander-Klement & Pollatsek, 2006) and the frequencies of both the first and second constituents of a long Finnish compound word influence the gaze duration on the word in sentence context (Hyönä & Pollatsek, 1998;Pollatsek, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2000). Thus, fixation times on disarray are longer than those on disorder (array has a lower frequency than does order), even though the prefixed words themselves are matched on frequency (Niswander-Klement & Pollatsek, 2006). These results thus indicate that morphemic components are influencing the word-identification process.For words with both a prefix and a suffix, however, there is the additional question of the order in which readers attach the affixes to the root morpheme. For example, for unlockable, if one first attaches the prefix to the root morpheme to get the left-branching structure unlock-able, the word means "can be unlocked," whereas, if one first attaches the suffix to get the right-branching structure unlockable, it means "cannot be locked" (see Figure 1).Words of this form (unXable) are unique in English in having two legal structures. In contrast, relockable has only one legal structure: the right-branching relock-able. That is because the prefix re-applies only to verbs, so that re-lockable is an inadmissible structure. In contrast, a word like unsinkable must have the left-branching structure, unsinkable, because one cannot unsink something. However, this still leaves open the question of how people process trimorphemic words. One possibility is that, for structurally unambiguous words like relockable, readers do not Many trimorphemic words are structurally and semantically ambiguous. For example, unlockable can either be un-lockable (cannot be locked) or unlock-able (can be unlocked). Which interpretation is preferred and whether the preceding sentence context affects the initial interpretation is not clear from prior research. The present experiment embedded ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence contexts, manipulated whether or not preceding context disambiguated the meaning, and examined the pattern of fixation durations on the ambiguous word and the remainder of the text. The results indicated that the unlock-able interpretation was preferred; moreover, preceding context did not exert a significant effect until the eyes had initially exited from the target word.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2010, 17 (1), 88-94 doi:10.3758/PBR.17.1.88 A. Pollatsek, pollatsek@psych.umass.edu

show abstract

Using Internet search engines to estimate word frequency

Cited by 70 publications

References 13 publications

The emotional memory effect: Differential processing or item distinctiveness?

The emotional memory effect: Differential processing or item distinctiveness?

Gradient clash, faithfulness, and sonority sequencing effects in Russian compound stress

The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context

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