Introduction

Have you ever noticed that you can read a passage in a novel or magazine much more quickly than you can read a passage in a textbook? The word frequency effect, a psychological phenomenon where words we see often (such as 'cat') are recognized more quickly than words we see less often such as 'vat', is probably partly to blame. Novels tend to contain high frequency words people use in everyday speech whereas many textbooks contain new, complex, low frequency words that you may not have seen before, or have seen very rarely. If you have some books handy see for yourself by flipping to a random page; chances are your novel will contain words that you can easily skim over whereas the text will be full of new words that you have to think about a bit before you can understand what they mean. The reason for the word frequency effect is hotly debated, some researchers think that seeing a word more often lower the threshold of activation for that word meaning you need less additional activation to recognize the word when it's presented, other argue that higher frequency words have a higher 'resting level of activation' so that less additional activation is needed for recognition when the word is presented. Whichever model is correct it is certain that any model of word recognition must account for this very robust effect.

Higher frequency word has lower threshold than lower frequency words

Higher frequency words have higher resting level of activation than lower frequency words

Let's see it in action! We will be using the lexical decision task to look at the word frequency effect.