The word frequency effect: A review of recent developments and implications for the choice of frequency estimates in German

Brysbaert, M., Buchmeier, M., Conrad, M., Jacobs, AM., Bölte, J. & Böhl, A.

Zusammenfassung

We review recent evidence indicating that researchers in experimental psychology may have used suboptimal estimates of wordfrequency. Word frequency measures should be based on a corpus of at least 20 million words that contains language participants in psychologyexperiments are likely to have been exposed to. In addition, the quality of word frequency measures should be ascertained by correlating themwith behavioral word processing data. When we apply these criteria to the word frequency measures available for the German language, we findthat the commonly used Celex frequencies are the least powerful to predict lexical decision times. Better results are obtained with the Leipzigfrequencies, the dlexDB frequencies, and the Google Books 2000-2009 frequencies. However, as in other languages the best performance isobserved with subtitle-based word frequencies. The SUBTLEX-DE word frequencies collected for the present ms are made available in easy-tousefiles and are free for educational purposes.

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