THE WORD FREQUENCY EFFECT AND LEXICAL ACCESS*

Some recent experiments suggest that only open class words show a frequency effect. Closed class items are accessed independently of their frequency. We carried out five experiments to test the validity of this hypothesis for the French language. All our results suggest that the frequency effect applies equally well to the open and closed class items. ONE OF the best established findings in experimental psycholinguistics relates the frequency of occurrence of a word to the time required for its recognition. H~WES and SOLOMON [l] showed that the visual recognition threshold for tachistoscopically presented words is a function of the logarithm of their frequency. Similarly, H~WES [2] found a correlation between the frequency of a word and the signal to noise ratio necessary for the recognition of that word. Other tasks such as lexical decision [3], naming time [4] have also revealed a frequency effect. These results have been replicated with other languages. FRAISSE [S] found a good correlation between visual threshold, naming time and word frequency in French. So pervasive was this effect of frequency that most theories of lexical access have acknowledged it in one form or another [6, 71. Specially MORTON [8] and FORSTER [9] have constructed models in which word frequency plays a critical role. In a recent series of lexical decision experiments, however, BRADLEY [lo] has found a frequency effect for words belonging to the open class and not to the closed class. While a formal distinction between the open and closed classes has not yet been established (and may not even be possible), it is generally thought that the open class syntactic categories like verbs and nouns have many members with the possibility of adding new ones. The members of the closed class syntactic categories like prepositions, conjunctions, and pronouns, on the other hand, form a restricted and non-productive set. *The results reported in this paper were first presented at the CNRS MIT Conference on Cognitive Psychology held at the Royaumont Abbey in France in June 1980. tReprint requests should be sent to Dr. Juan Segui, Laboratoire de Psychologie ExpCrimentale, 28 rue Serpente. 75006, Paris. IPresent address: Center for Cognitive Science. MIT. Cambridge, MA, U.S.A.