Leon TITLE " The American Heritage Word Frequency Book " and Its Relation to the Communication Skills Lexicon

This paper reviews The American Heritage word frequancy book by John B. Carroll, Peter Davies, and Barry Richman (CDR). CDR is a word frequency count derived from school books for children in grades 3-9. Included in this review are an explanation of the development of CDR and a guide to its practical use. The guide can be used independently of the rest of the paper. Comments are also made on the usefulness of CDR for compilation of the Communication Skills Lexicon. Finally, various word frequency counts and frequency measures are ,C) compared and discussed in terms of their utility for assigning fre6O quency values to words in the Lexicon.