Exploring native and non-native intuitions of word frequency

Abstract

Native speakers have intuitions about how frequently words occur in their language, but methodological limitations have not previously allowed a detailed description of these intuitions. This study asked native and non-native speakers to give judgements of frequency for near synonyms in 12 lexical sets and compared those responses to modern corpus word counts. The native speakers were able to discern the core word in the lexical sets either 77% or 85% of the time, depending on whether the core word was the reference against which the other words in the set were judged, with the non-native results at 71% and 79%. The correlation between the native speakers' ratings and corpus data was .530, which calls into question the higher results from previous studies. The non-native correlation was .577. A Hellinger distance procedure demonstrated generally good judgements of absolute frequency on an individual word basis. Contrary to previous findings, the correlation and Hellinger analyses indicate that natives are not homogeneous in their frequency intuitions, with education one apparent differentiating factor. The results suggest that, for lexical sets in which all words were rated, educated non-natives have intuitions of word frequency which are as good or better than natives with less education, while educated natives have better frequency intuitions than their educated non-native counterparts.