Corroborating biased indicators: Global and local agreement among objective and subjective estimates of printed word frequency |
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Authors: | Glenn L Thompson and Alain Desrochers |
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Institution: | (1) School of Psychology, University of Ottawa, 145 Jean-Jacques Lussier, P.O. Box 450, Station A, KIN 6N6 Ottawa, ON, Canada |
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Abstract: | The internal validity of several types of experiments in experimental psychology and neuroscience depends in part on the possibility
of controlling or manipulating critical lexical variables such as word frequency of occurrence. Two ways of estimating this
variable are (1) objective frequency counts and (2) subjective ratings of word frequency. Each method produces estimates that
generally agree (i.e., they are highly correlated) but that disagree substantially concerning the relative frequency of a
number of words. To investigate this issue more closely, the global and local agreement of subjective frequency estimates
was examined in detail for a pool of 6,202 words drawn from the OMNILEX database of French words (Desrochers, 2006; www.omnilex.uottawa
.ca). The results indicated that objective and subjective frequencies are strongly correlated, subjective frequencies share
a significant amount of bias variance with other lexical characteristics (e.g., imageability), and the codeterminants of subjective frequency are in an
antagonistic relationship with one another. The implications of these results for the selection of lexical stimuli are discussed,
and multiple variables to aid in item selection are reported. Supplemental materials for this study may be downloaded from
brm.psychonomic-journals.org/ content/supplemental. |
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