Corpora: Subjective familiarity and objective frequency counts

[James L. Fidelholtz]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Bruce Lambert wrote:

>Does anyone know of research examining the correlation between subjective
>assessments of familiarity/frequency (i.e., how often do you see, hear,
>read, write, speak this word?) and objective frequency counts (based on
>large corpora)?
>
>I know of one such paper by the psycholinguist Paul Luce (I will provide
>the reference when I can find it again). Any other pointers or comments on
>this issue are welcome.
>
>My specific interest is in the relationship between the prescribing
>frequency of specific drugs (drug names) and health professionals'
>subjective familiarity with those same names. This kind of information is
>very important in  psycholinguistic research, where the effects of word
>frequency can be quite overpowering.
>
>On a related note, I'd appreciate pointers to any corpus of
>medical/pharmaceutical/nursing literature that might serve as the basis for
>an empirical count of drug names in the professional or scientific press.

Dear Bruce:
	In an article of mine published in 1975 (ref. below), I refer to
the distinction you mentioned between, on the one hand, writing and
speech (see figure (18) in note 11, conjectural though it may be), and
on the other hand, the subjective feelings of differences (cf. the
discussion of _berserk_  on p. 207, and the discussion of
mistake/mistook at various points in the article).

reference:
Fidelholtz, James L. 1975. Word frequency and vowel reduction in
	English.  _Chicago linguistic society. Regional meeting. Papers_
	11.200-213.

Sorry about the lack of any experiments done by me either here or later,
but in any case something often goes wrong with such experiments,
especially when they go against one's intuitions about the subject.
(Nevertheless, I do support such experiments, and please let us know
about any other references you run across).  Thanks.
	Jim

--
James L. Fidelholtz			e-mail: jfidel at siu.buap.mx
Posgrado en Ciencias del Lenguaje	tel.: +(52-2)229-5500 x5705
Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades	fax: +(01-2) 229-5681
Benemιrita Universidad Autσnoma de Puebla, MΙXICO