Establishing verb frequency

[Ray Weitzman]

One of the things you might want to consider in regard to verb frequency is
distinguishing between the overall probability of occurrence of a particular
verb in the samplings of the child's speech over time and the momentary
frequency with which the verb occurs in the child's speech in a certain set
of specific circumstances.  I think you will find that the overall frequency
is less revealing and less interesting for what you want to do than the
momentary frequency.

Ray Weitzman

----- Original Message -----
From: "Casillas Navarro, Gabriela" <gcasil at essex.ac.uk>
To: <info-childes at mail.talkbank.org>
Sent: Monday, November 24, 2003 8:18 AM
Subject: Establishing verb frequency


> Dear all
> I'm working on the acquisition of verb morphology in L2-English, and I
> am in the process of designing a task aimed at testing knowledge of
> regular/irregular past tense forms and amongst several variables I am
> interested in controlling for verb frequency. I have surveyed a number
> of psycholinguistic studies and most of them seem to be doing slightly
> different things with regards to operationalizing verb frequency (e.g.
> different studies take into consideration stem /lemma vs. word form
> frequency). I plan on using the British National Corpus to establish
> frequencies since this corpus is available in my institution.
>
>
> Any suggestions/references/practical hints are greatly appreciated!
> Thanks in advance
>
> Gabriela Casillas
>
> gcasil at essex.ac.uk
>
>