Comparing the Frequency Effect Between the Lexical Decision and Naming Tasks in Chinese

CCLOWW: A grade-level Chinese children's lexicon of written words

In this article, we present the Chinese Children's Lexicon of Written Words (CCLOWW), the first grade-level database that provides frequency statistics of simplified Chinese characters and words for children. The database computes from a corpus of 34,671,424 character tokens and 22,427,010 word tokens (including single- and multicharacter words), extracted from 2131 books. It contains 6746 different character types and 153,079 different word types. CCLOWW provides several frequency indices of simplified Chinese for three grade levels (grade 2 and below, grades 3-4, grades 5-6) to profile children's experience with written Chinese in and outside of school. We describe in this article the distributions of frequency and contextual diversity of the characters and words, as well as word length and syntactic categories of the words in the corpus and the subcorpora. We also report results of correlation analyses with other written corpora and of several naming and lexicon decision experiments. The findings suggest that CCLOWW frequency measures correlate well with other corpora. Importantly, they could reliably predict children's and adults' naming and lexical decision performances. They could also explain variance in adults' visual word recognition, in addition to frequency measures computed in an adult corpus, indicating that early print exposure might influence readers' lexical processing later on beyond an age of acquisition effect. CCLOWW will help researchers in language processing and development as well as educators with selecting language materials appropriate for children's developmental stages. The database is freely available online at https://www.learn2read.cn/database/ .

Word frequency effects on judgments of learning: More than just beliefs

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are usually higher for high-frequency words than for low-frequency words, which has been attributed to beliefs about how word frequency affects memory. The main goal of the present study was to explore if identifying word frequency as a relevant cue is necessary for it to affect JOLs. The idea is that for one to base judgments in beliefs of how a variable affects memory, one must first consider that variable. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants studied a list of high- and low-frequency words, made immediate JOLs, and answered questions aimed at identifying the cues used to make those JOLs. The results showed that identifying word frequency as a cue was not necessary for effects on JOLs to occur, suggesting that some participants could not have used beliefs about how word frequency affects memory when making JOLs. In Experiment 3, we measured processing fluency of high- and low-frequency words through a lexical decision task. Participants identified high-frequency words quicker than low-frequency words, suggesting the former to be more fluently processed. In Experiment 4, we explored if response times in a lexical decision task mediated the effect of word frequency on JOLs. Results showed a significant mediation of 8-13%, depending on the analysis technique. We argue that theory-driven processes do not fully account for word frequency effects on JOLs.