Word values, word frequency, and visual duration thresholds.

Rated pleasantness and association value of 101 English nouns

“…Lorge Count was correlated with a′ .533 (p < .01) for the women and .764 (p < .01) for the men. The correlations presented by Johnson et al (1960) between pleasantness and frequency were .38, .40, and .63; roughly the same order of magnitude as that presented here. That the correlation between a′ and frequency fell so far short of unity is to be expected from Noble's (1963) discussion of this relation.…”

“…Despite the challenging papers of Martin, andJohnson, Thomson, andFrincke (1960, 1961), very little recent work has been reported on the infl uence of pleasantness of materials on recognition or verbal learning. Perhaps this is due partly to an absence of a standardized set of pleasantness norms for a large sample of verbal materials.…”

Attitudinal effects of mere exposure.

“…Johnson, Thomson, and Frincke (1960) obtained correlations of .63, .40, and .38 between the L-count (Thorndike & Lorge, 1944) and the good-bad scale values for three samples of randomly chosen words. In a further attempt, they constructed 30 pairs, each consisting of one frequent and one infrequent word.…”

“…Postman (1953) seems to be one of the early workers to note its generality, while Howes and Solomon (1950) observed in their critique of McGinnies' (1949) perceptual defense experiment that the so-called "taboo" words he used as stimuli are particularly infrequent. However, the first systematic research effort that demonstrates the wordfrequency-word-value relationship is due to Johnson, Thomson, and Frincke (1960). These authors were the first, I believe, to collect empirical data showing that words with "positive" meaning have higher frequency counts than words with "negative" meanings.…”

“…They have also gathered experimental evidence showing that the repeated use of a nonsense word tends to enhance its rating on the good-bad scale of the semantic differential. Johnson, Thomson, and Frincke (1960) have not tried to explain either of these two aspects of the frequency-value relationship, being primarily concerned with its implications for the study of word-recognition thresholds.…”