Oral frequency norms for 67,979 Spanish words

Abstract

Frequency of occurrence is an important attribute of lexical units, and one that is widely used in psychological research and theorization. Although printed frequency norms have long been available for Spanish, and subtitlebased norms have more recently been published, oral frequency norms have not been systematically compiled for a representative set of words. In this study, a corpus of over three million units, representing present-day use of the language in Spain, was used to derive a frequency count of spoken words. The corpus consisted of 913 separate documents that contained transcriptions of oral recordings obtained in a wide variety of situations, mostly radio and television programs. The resulting database, containing absolute and relative frequency values for 67,979 orally produced words, is presented. Validity analyses showed significant correlations of oral frequency with other frequency measures and suggest that oral frequency can predict some types of lexical processing with the same or higher levels of precision, when contrasted with text-or subtitle-based frequencies. In conclusion, we discuss ways in which these oral frequency norms can be put to use. The norms can be downloaded from www.springerlink.com.Keywords Word frequency . Spoken word frequency . Frequency estimates . Spanish norms Lexical frequency is a descriptive attribute that makes reference to the extent to which a particular word is used by the speakers of a given language. The findings of many diachronic linguistic studies have suggested that the frequency with which linguistic units are produced and encountered in the course of verbal interactions modulates the way in which languages change over time, affecting variations in phonology, morphology, and grammar (Bybee, 2007). For example, quantitative analyses of word usage throughout extended periods of time have revealed that, at least in Indo-European languages, terms that occur very frequently in discourse are more resistant to change than are those in lesser use (Pagel, Atkinson, & Meade, 2007). Additionally, and more relevant to the purpose of this study, the results of many psychological experiments entailing the control and manipulation of verbal materials indicate that lexical frequency is involved in important aspects of human cognition related to language and memory.Psycholinguistic studies have consistently found that, when other variables are held constant, higher frequency words are more readily processed than lower frequency words in tasks such as word recognition, lexical decision, and naming (e.g.,

Subjective age-of-acquisition norms for 4,640 verbs in Spanish

“…Additional analyses exploring the correlations of the present scores with lexical performance measures showed that, as would be expected from other studies in Spanish (e.g., Alonso et al, 2015), the AoA of a verb was a significant predictor of its lexical decision time (r = .58, N = 536) when tests were run on the data provided by González-Nosti, Barbón, Rodríguez-Ferreiro, and Cuetos (2013), although AoA was not systematically related to the naming time (r = -.02, N = 528) when tests were run on the data provided by Davies et al (2013). Finally, the expected negative correlations between AoA and several estimators of frequency were found: r = -.50 in the case of oral frequency (Alonso et al, 2011), r = -.54 in the case of printed frequency (Sebastián- 1 The number of age responses to each verb varied. Although most verbs were known to a majority of the participants (78 % of verbs were assigned an age score by at least 90 % of the respondents), not all participants knew all of the verbs they had to judge.…”

“…They were drawn from other available lexical databases in Spanish, namely an oral frequency set (Alonso, Fernandez, & Díez, 2011), two multi-index sets (Algarabel & Sanmartín, 1985;Sebastián-Gallés, Martí, Carreiras, & Cuetos, 2000), and a set of descriptors for action pictures (Cuetos & Alija, 2003). The verbs varied widely in features such as number of letters (ranging from 2 to 16) or frequency of use (ranging from 0.32 to 1849 per million in Alonso et al, 2011).…”

Procura-PALavras (P-Pal): uma nova medida de frequência lexical do português europeu contemporâneo

“…Estes valores parecem evidenciar, à semelhança do observado noutras línguas (ex., Alonso, Fernandez, & Díez, 2011;Pastizzo & Carbonne, 2007), que as frequências lexicais computadas para a linguagem escrita no PE poderão ser tomadas como um bom indicador das frequências obtidas a partir da linguagem oral, e que o facto de o P-PAL integrar essencialmente informação oriunda de registos de linguagem escrita (e, dentro destes, de tipo jornalístico), poderá não constituir em si mesmo uma limitação à sua validade. Aliás, a inclusão no P-PAL de outros corpora permitiu enriquecer fortemente a sua diversidade linguística, dado que do corpus oral Museu Pessoa foram incorporadas no P-PAL apenas 14.259 formas e 6.934 lemas o que constitui somente 6,8% e 13,2% do léxico total respectivo.…”

EsPal: One-stop shopping for Spanish word properties

“…3 For future comparison, we also allowed words present in other recent Spanish corpora projects (Alonso et al, 2011;Cuetos-Vega et al, 2011). In addition, we included a large number of Spanish first names, surnames, and place names from publicly available websites.…”

“…We compare the three EsPal corpora with three other Spanish data sources: LEXESP (Sebastián-Gallés et al, 2000), although in the form of B-Pal (Davis & Perea, 2005), which did extensive cleaning of the data; SUBTLEX-ESP (Cuetos-Vega et al, 2011), which also used subtitles (although from different online sources); and oral frequency data from Alonso et al (2011). Table 6 shows the overall frequency correlations between each of these sources based on the number of words they have in common, although better means may be available for such comparisons (Brysbaert & Diependaele, 2012).…”