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The word frequency effect is a subject matter associated with cognitive psychology and is a psychological phenomenon where recognition times are faster for words seen more frequently than for words seen less frequently. Word frequency depends on individual awareness of the tested language. The phenomenon can be extended to different characters of the word in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese.

A word is considered to be high frequency if the word is commonly used in daily speech, such as the word "the." A word is considered to be low frequency if the word is not commonly used, such as the word "strait." Some languages such as Chinese have multiple levels of daily speech that impact frequency of words. There is frequency at the character level or at the word level or orthographic level. Lower frequency words benefit more from a single repetition than higher frequency words.

Contents
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 * 1 Examples
 * 3 Criticisms
 * 4 Real World Applications
 * 4.1 Test-taking
 * 4.2 Driving
 * 5 See also
 * 6 References

Cognitive Influences [edit | edit source]
The word frequency effect changes how the brain encodes the information. Readers began the higher frequency words faster than the lower frequency words when spelling the words from dictation. The length of saccade varies depending on the frequency of words and the validity of the previous (preview) word in predicting the target word. For higher frequency target words, the saccades as the reader approaches the word is longer when there is a valid preview word in front of it than for lower frequency words. When the preview word is invalid, there is no difference in saccades between high or low frequency words. Fixations follow an opposite pattern with longer fixations on low frequency words. Research has also found that high frequency words are skipped more when read than low frequency words. Gaze duration is also shorter when reading high frequency words than low frequency words. Module connections are strengthened as words increase in frequency assisting to explain differences in brain processing.

Leading Character Frequency Effect (LCF)
Reaction times for target words with a first character that was high frequency was shorter than those with first characters that were low frequency when simply naming the Chinese word. When making a lexical decision, target words with higher LCF took longer to respond to than low LCF. These effects were moderated by the predictability of the next words as well as the predictability of the target word given the previous word. The surrounding words also being high frequency results In faster reaction times particularly when the target word is high frequency as compared to low frequency words.

Real World Applications[edit | edit source]
The importance of the word-frequency effect can be observed in time-sensitive situations.

Test-taking[edit | edit source]
The quick recognition of a word would potentially be important during a timed written assessment. With a strict limit on time available to complete a test, the presence of higher frequency words on the assessment would be more beneficial to the test-taker than low frequency words, as the high frequency words would be recognized faster and thus time could be utilized on other areas of the assessment.

Driving[edit | edit source]
Quick recognition of a word could also be important when reading road signs while driving. As a vehicle moves and passed road signs on the side of the road, there is only a short amount of time available to be able to read the road signs. The presence of higher frequency words on the road sign would allow for faster recognition and processing of road sign meaning, which could be critical in such a time sensitive situation.

Bilingualism
As word frequency effect increased in both languages, total reading time decreased. In L1 (first language) there were higher skipping rates than in L2 (second language). This suggests that lower frequency words in L2 were harder to process than both high and low frequency words in L1. Familiarity of the language plays a large role in reacting to the frequency of words. Reaction rates of bilingual adults could also be impacted by age. Older adults were significantly slower to respond to lower frequency words but were faster to process higher frequency words.

Future Directions[edit | edit source]
Psycholinguists believe that future study of the word frequency effect needs to consider the role of heuristics to determine the difference in eye movements between high and low frequency words.

See also[edit | edit source]

 * Word lists by frequency
 * tf–idf
 * Missing letter effect
 * Zipf's law

References[edit | edit source]

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 * 15) Jump up ^ I have chosen to edit the Mental Rotation article.  I plan to first change all of the citations from APA style into Wikipedia style to get a unified system in place.  I also plan to try to eliminate some of the repetition and make the sections more straightforward and concise.  I may also combine or reorganize the way some of the research sections are presented ie putting the "Notable Research" section at the end or separating that information into the separate paragraphs about the research in depth.  I could also add some relevant research about different groups of people thus adding some more recent studies to the "Real Life Application" section (also will rename the section)."Potential resources:"Provost, A. & Heathcote, A. Titrating Decision processes in the mental rotation task (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0039706

Xu, Y. & Franconeri, S. Capacity for visual features in mental rotation (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797615585002

Jansen, P. et al. Factors influencing mental-rotation with action-based gender-stereotyped objects--The role of fine motor skills (2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12144-014-9269-7

Meneghetti, C. et al. The Role of Practice and Strategy in mental rotation training: Transfer and Maintenance effects (2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00426-016-0749-2

Gardony, A. et al. What does physical rotation reveal about mental rotation? (2014) http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797613503174

Provost, A et al. Two Routes to Expertise in mental Rotation (2013).http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12042

Beginning Edit of "Real Life Application" to the Mental Rotation Article

Future Directions for Research [edit | edit source]
Further information: Abstraction

There may be relationships between competent bodily movement and the speed with which individuals can perform mental rotation. Researchers found children who trained with mental rotation tasks had improved strategy skills after practicing. Follow-ups studies will compare the differences in the brain among the attempts to discover effects on other tasks and the brain. People use many different strategies to complete tasks; psychologists will study participants who use specific cognitive skills to compare competency and reaction times. Others will continue to examine the differences in competency of mental rotation based on the objects being rotated. Participants' identification with the object could hinder or help their mental rotation abilities across gender and ages to support the earlier claim that males have faster reactionary times. Psychologists will continue to test similarities between mental rotation and physical rotation examining the difference in reaction times and relevance to environmental implications.

Changing Citations to Wikipedia Style Throughout Whole Article Minus the "Real Life Applications Section" edited above

Introduction[edit | edit source]
Mental rotation, as a function of visual representation in the human brain, has been associated with the right cerebral hemisphere. There is a relationship between similar areas of the brain associated with perception and mental rotation. There could also be a relationship between the cognitive rate of spatial processing, general intelligence and mental rotation. Mental rotation can be described as the brain moving objects in order to help understand what they are and where they belong. Mental rotation has been studied to try to figure out how the mind recognizes objects in their environment. Researchers generally call such objects stimuli. Mental rotation is one cognitive function for the person to figure out what the altered object is.

Mental rotation can be separated into the following cognitive stages:
 * 1) Create a mental image of an object from all directions (imagining where it continues straight vs. turns)
 * 2) Rotate the object mentally until a comparison can be made (orientating the stimulus to other figure)
 * 3) Make the comparison
 * 4) Decide if the objects are the same or not
 * 5) Report the decision (reaction time is recorded when level pulled or button pushed)

Assessment[edit | edit source]
In a mental rotation test, the participant compares two 3D objects (or letters), often rotated in some axis, and states if they are the same image or if they are mirror images (enantiomorphs). The pairs are split with some pairs being rotated, and others mirroring each other. The researcher judges how accurately and rapidly the participant can distinguish between the mirrored and non-mirrored pairs.

History of Mental Rotation[edit | edit source]
Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler did original research concerning this phenomenon. Their research showed that the reaction time for participants to decide if the pair of items matched or not was linearly proportional to the angle of rotation from the original position. The original research combined the mental rotation task with a physical signal of their decision of rotation vs. mirroring. That is, the more an object has been rotated from the original, the longer it takes an individual to determine if the 2 images are of the same object or mirrored images (enantiomorphs). Shortly afterwards, Robert Sekuler and David Nash demonstrated that a pair of mental transformations, size scaling and rotation, produced additive effects on reaction time, consistent with serial processing of these transformations.

In 1978, Steven G. Vandenberg and Allan R. Kuse developed a test to assess mental rotation abilities that was based on Shepard and Metzler’s (1971) original study. This test was constructed using India ink drawings. Each stimulus was a two-dimensional image of a three-dimensional object drawn by a computer. Following the basic ideas of Shepard and Metzler's experiment, this study found a significant difference in the mental rotation scores between both the two genders. Correlations with other measures showed strong association with tests of spatial visualization and no association with verbal ability (Vandenberg & Kuse, 1978) (Student Editor Kate Hardin found this citation and inputted it; I could not find it).

In further research, Shepard and Cooper have proposed the concept of a "Mental Imagery" facility, which is responsible for the ability to mentally rotate visual forms. Additionally, it has been found it does not matter on which axis an object is rotated, but rather the degree to which it is rotated that has the most significant effect on response time. So rotations within the depth plane (i.e., 2D rotations) and rotations in depth (3D rotations) behave similarly. Thus, the matching requires more time as the amount of depth rotation increases, just as for within the depth plane.

In subsequent research, it has been found that response times increase for degraded stimuli and can decrease when participants are allowed to practice mentally rotating imagery. This research has been instrumental in showing how people use mental representations to navigate their environments.

Indeed, some areas in the brain are more activated in the male brain than in the female brain during a mental rotation exercise. That could explain why the time-response and the accuracy in mental rotation tests tend to be better for males in mental rotation tasks.

The ability to rotate mentally (measured in terms of decline in response time) peaks in young adult-hood, and declines thereafter.

Recent breakthroughs in nuclear magnetic resonance have allowed psychologists to discover what parts of the brain correspond to the use of this mental imagery function. Using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, psychologists have shown that when participants are performing mental rotation tasks, there is activation in Brodmann's areas 7A and 7B, the middle frontal gyrus, extra-striate cortex, the hand somastosensory cortex, and frontal cortex.1.

Other recent research has centered on whether there might be multiple neural systems for the rotation of mental imagery. Parsons found that when participants were presented with line drawings of hands rather than Shepard and Metzler-like 3D blocks showed embodiment effects in which participants were slower to rotate hand stimuli in directions that were incompatible with the way human wrist and arm joints move. This finding suggested that the rotation of mental imagery was underlain by multiple neural systems: that is, (at least) a motoric/tactile one as well as a visual one. In a similar vein, Amorim, Isableu and Jarraya have found that adding a cylindric "head" to Shepard and Metzler line drawings of 3D objects can create facilitation and inhibition effects as compared to standard Metzler-like stimuli, further suggesting that these neural systems rely on embodied cognition.

External links[edit | edit source]

 * Mental rotation lesson using PsyToolkit
 * "Shepard-Metzler resource pack". An open source collection of items for use in the creation of mental rotation tasks.

WORD FREQUENCY ARTICLE The word frequency effect is a subject matter associated with cognitive psychology and is a psychological phenomenon where recognition times are faster for words seen more frequently than for words seen less frequently in alphabetic languages.[1]. A word is considered to be high frequency if the word is commonly used in daily speech, such as the word "the." A word is considered to be low frequency if the word is not commonly used, such as the word "strait."[2] High frequency can also be defined as a word that appears often in writing. Some languages such as Chinese have multiple levels of daily speech that impact frequency of words. There is frequency at the character level or at the word level.[3]

Contents  [hide] 1 Examples 2 History 3 Criticisms 4 Real World Applications 4.1 Test-taking 4.2 Driving 5 See also 6 References

Examples[edit | edit source] Word Ranking The 1st[4] At 20th So 50th Did 70th Got 100th Mind 300th Chaos 5,000th Falkland 20,000th Marche 45,000th Tisane 85,000th

Real World Applications[edit | edit source] The importance of the word-frequency effect can be observed in time-sensitive situations. Test-taking[edit | edit source] The quick recognition of a word would potentially be important during a timed written assessment. With a strict limit on time available to complete a test, the presence of higher frequency words on the assessment would be more beneficial to the test-taker than low frequency words, as the high frequency words would be recognized faster and thus time could be utilized on other areas of the assessment. Driving[edit | edit source] Quick recognition of a word could also be important when reading road signs while driving. As a vehicle moves and passed road signs on the side of the road, there is only a short amount of time available to be able to read the road signs. The presence of higher frequency words on the road sign would allow for faster recognition and processing of road sign meaning, which could be critical in such a time sensitive situation. See also[edit | edit source] Word lists by frequency tf–idf Missing letter effect Zipf's law References[edit | edit source] Jump up ^ Daniel Smilek; Scott Sinnett; Alan Kingstone. "Cognition". Oxford University Press Canada. Retrieved 7 May 2014. Jump up ^ "Word Frequency Effect". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 21 October 2014. Jump up ^ Li, Meng-Feng; Gao, Xin-Yu; Chou, Tai-Li; Wu, Jei-Tun (2017-02-01). "Neighborhood Frequency Effect in Chinese Word Recognition: Evidence from Naming and Lexical Decision". Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. 46 (1): 227–245. doi:10.1007/s10936-016-9431-5. ISSN 0090-6905. Jump up ^ Harris, Jonathan. "Wordcount". Retrieved 4 November 2014. Jump up ^ Harley, Trevor (2008). The psychology of language from data to theory (3rd ed.). New York, NY: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-84169-381-1. Retrieved 3 November 2014. Jump up ^ Howes, D. H. (1957). "On the relation between the intelligibility and frequency of occurrence of English words". Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 29: 296–305. doi:10.1121/1.1908862. Jump up ^ Rosenzweig, M. R.; Postman, L (1957). "Intelligibility as a function of frequency of usage". J. Exp. Psychol. 54: 412–422. doi:10.1037/h0041465. Jump up ^ Pollack, I; Rubenstein, H; Decker, L. "Intelligibility of known and unknown message sets". J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 31: 273–279. doi:10.1121/1.1907712. Jump up ^ Brown, H; Rubenstein, C.R (1961). "Test of response bias explanation of word-frequency effect". Science. 133: 280–281. doi:10.1126/science.133.3448.280. Jump up ^ Segui, J; Mehler, J; Frauenfelder, U; Morton, J (1982). "The word frequency effect and lexical access". Neuropsychologia. 20: 615–627. doi:10.1016/0028-3932(82)90061-6. Jump up ^ Balota, D.A; Chumbley, J.I (1984). "The locus of word-frequency effects in the pronunciation task: Lexical access and/or production frequency". Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. doi:10.1016/0749-596X(85)90017-8. Retrieved 3 November 2014. Jump up ^ Balota, D.A; Paul, S.T; Spieler, D.H (1999). "Attentional control of lexical processing pathways during word recognition and reading". Language processing: 15–57. Jump up ^ Grafman, J; Thompson, K; Weingartner, H; Martinez, R; Lawlor, B.A; Sunderland, T (1991). "Script generation as an indicator of knowledge representation in patients with Alzheimer's disease". Brain Lang. 40: 344–358. doi:10.1016/0093-934x(91)90134-m. Jump up ^ Sirigu, A; Zalla, T; Pillon, B; Grafman, J; Agid, Y; Dubois, B (1995). "Selective impairments in managerial knowledge following pre-frontal cortex damage". Cortex. 31: 301–316. doi:10.1016/s0010-9452(13)80364-4. Jump up ^ Voyer, Daniel (2003). "Word frequency and laterality effects in lexical decision: Right hemisphere mechanisms". Brain and Language. 87 (3): 421–431. doi:10.1016/s0093-934x(03)00143-3. Retrieved 4 November 2014.