Balota D A, Pilotti M, Cortese M J
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri 63130-4899, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2001 Jun;29(4):639-47. doi: 10.3758/bf03200465.
Subjective frequency estimates for large sample of monosyllabic English words were collected from 574 young adults (undergraduate students) and from a separate group of 1,590 adults of varying ages and educational backgrounds. Estimates from the latter group were collected via the internet. In addition, 90 healthy older adults provided estimates for a random sample of 480 of these words. All groups rated words with respect to the estimated frequency of encounters of each word on a 7-point scale, ranging from never encountered to encountered several times a day. The young and older groups also rated each word with respect to the frequency of encounters in different perceptual domains (e.g., reading, hearing, writing, or speaking). The results of regression analyses indicated that objective log frequency and meaningfulness accounted for most of the variance in subjective frequency estimates, whereas neighborhood size accounted for the least amount of variance in the ratings. The predictive power of log frequency and meaningfulness were dependent on the level of subjective frequency estimates. Meaningfulness was a better predictor of subjective frequency for uncommon words, whereas log frequency was a better predictor of subjective frequency for common words. Our discussion focuses on the utility of subjective frequency estimates compared with other estimates of familiarity. The raw subjective frequency data for all words are available at http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/dbalota/labpub.html.
我们从574名年轻成年人（本科生）以及另一组由1590名不同年龄和教育背景的成年人中收集了大量单音节英语单词的主观频率估计值。后一组的估计值是通过互联网收集的。此外，90名健康的老年人对这些单词中的480个随机样本提供了估计值。所有组都根据每个单词的估计出现频率，在从从未遇到过到每天遇到几次的7分制量表上对单词进行评分。年轻组和老年组还根据单词在不同感知领域（如阅读、听力、写作或口语）中的出现频率对每个单词进行评分。回归分析结果表明，客观对数频率和意义性解释了主观频率估计中大部分的方差，而邻域大小在评分中解释的方差最少。对数频率和意义性的预测能力取决于主观频率估计的水平。对于不常见的单词，意义性是主观频率的更好预测指标，而对于常见的单词，对数频率是主观频率的更好预测指标。我们的讨论重点在于主观频率估计与其他熟悉度估计相比的效用。所有单词的原始主观频率数据可在http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/dbalota/labpub.html获取。
