Debriefing
The size of the word frequency effect will depend on stimuli used with the greatest effect observed when the high frequency words are extremely common (such as 'THE') and the low frequency words are almost unheard of (such as 'STRAIT'). The word frequency effect has led cognitive psychologists developing models of word recognition to hypothesize that seeing a word has an impact on some aspect of the way the word is represented. Some researchers argue that seeing a word many times lowers the activation threshold for the word, whereas other researchers argue that high frequency words have a higher resting level of activation (in both case less activation is needed to reach threshold than a low frequency word making recognition quickly). It is possible that high frequency words are connected to so many other words that spreading activation is responsible for the higher recognition speed.