ABSTRACT
The effects of word frequency are ubiquitous in research on visual and spoken word recognition (Forster & Chambers, 1973), and considerable modeling efforts have been devoted to explaining the mechanisms responsible for the findings that higher frequency words are recognized more quickly and accurately than low frequency words. Typically, frequencies of stimuli have been estimated from counts of printed material (e.g., Thorndike & Lorge, 1944, and Kucera & Francis, 1967). Recently, however, subjective ratings of word frequency have provided an alternative measure for investigating effects of frequency on recognition. To obtain subjective ratings, subjects are asked directly how familiar they are with individually presented words. Gernsbacher (1984) has shown that many previous inconsistencies in research on word recognition can be dispelled when objective frequency counts are supplanted by subjective ratings.
