Article
Neighborhood Density and Frequency Across Languages and
Modalities
FRAUENFELDER, Ulrich Hans, BAAYEN, R.H., HELLWIG, F.M.
Abstract
This research exploits the English and Dutch CELEX lexical database to investigate the form
similarity relations between words. Lexical statistics analyses replicate and extend the findings
of Landauer and Streeter (1973) concerning the relation between a word′s frequency and the
density and frequency of its similarity neighborhood. The results for both Dutch and English
reveal only a weak tendency for high-frequency written and spoken words to have more
neighbors than rare words and for these neighbors to be more frequent than those of rare
words. However, the number of neighbors was found to correlate more highly with bigram
frequency than with word frequency. To clarify the relations between these properties, a
stochastic model is presented which captures the relevant effects of phonotactic structure on
neighborhood similarities. The implications of these findings for models of language
production and comprehension are considered.
Reference
FRAUENFELDER, Ulrich Hans, BAAYEN, R.H., HELLWIG, F.M. Neighborhood Density and
Frequency Across Languages and Modalities. Journal of Memory and Language, 1993, vol.
32, no. 6, p. 781-804
DOI : 10.1006/jmla.1993.1039
Available at:
http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:83832
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