• Title/Summary/Keyword: Word Frequency

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Frequency Inheritance in the Production of Korean Homophones

  • Han, Jeong-Im
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.14 no.1
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    • pp.7-19
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    • 2007
  • The present study investigates the so-called frequency inheritance effect in word production. According to some earlier studies (e.g. Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), retrieval of a low-frequency homophone benefits from its high-frequency homophone twin, and more specifically word-retrieval RT is determined by the frequency of the phonological form of the word (sum of homophone frequencies) rather than the frequency of the specific word. This result, however, has been challenged by later studies (e.g. Caramazza et al., 2001) and one possible resolution is that languages differ in the extent to which the inheritance effect occurs. Two experiments are reported to test whether the frequency inheritance effect depends on the target language, namely, if a language such as Korean with relatively many homophones tend not to show frequency inheritance, which is compared with the language with fewer homophones such as Dutch and German (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Jescheniak et al., 2003). Experiment 1 was picture naming, and Experiment 2 used an English-to-Korean translation task. In both experiments, the homophones were actually slower than the low-frequency controls, suggesting that there was no evidence for the inheritance effect. These results imply that the issue of whether specific word or homophone frequency determines production can be properly assessed by taking into account the language-specific nature of the lexicon such as the percentage of the homophone words in that language.

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A Study on Promoting Early Reading Ability through an Explicit High-frequency Sight Word Instruction

  • Huh, Keun
    • English Language & Literature Teaching
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    • v.17 no.1
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    • pp.17-35
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    • 2011
  • The purpose of this study was to explore the effect of an explicit word instruction for EFL beginning readers and their perception on the learning experience. Data were attained from 16 fourth graders who took English class as a development activity. Data include the results of pre- and post-test of high frequency sight word recognition, oral reading ability, students' survey responses, and teacher observation. The descriptive statistics were obtained for the result of the pre- and post-test. The findings from the student survey and teacher observation were also provided and interpreted to better understand the result of project and students' perception on the learning experience. The followings are the results of this study. The word recognition ability of the students was dramatically improved after the project. The students were satisfied with the overall learning experience perceiving it as helpful and fun learning. They expressed that the explicit word instruction helped their word recognition and reading ability. The results also supported that the confidence of students on their reading ability were heightened. Several suggestions are made for teachers and researchers on the word instruction for young EFL learners who are beginning readers.

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The Effect of Word Frequency on Noun Definitions (단어빈도가 명사정의하기에 미치는 효과)

  • Lee, Chan-Jong
    • The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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    • v.27 no.6
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    • pp.303-308
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    • 2008
  • The purpose of the present study is to investigate that word frequency has significant influence on noun definitions in Korean. The experimental group was 80 students from Elementary school, Middle school, High school and University. They rated familiarity and wrote definitions for nouns. Noun definitions were analyzed with semantic categories such as "use/purpose," "description," "association/relation," "partial explanation," "explanation," "error," "partial explanation-attribute," "partial explanation-specific class," "partial explanation-nonspecific class," "explanation-specific class," "explanation-nonspecific class." As a result, they showed familiarity for high-frequency nouns. "EXPL" categories that use class terms or critical attributes were used more frequently in definitions of high-frequency nouns compared with low-frequency nouns. They increased with age and errors decreased with age. Word frequency had a significant influence on noun definitions.

The Text-to-Speech System Assessment Based on Word Frequency and Word Regularity Effects (단어빈도와 단어규칙성 효과에 기초한 합성음 평가)

  • Nam, Ki-Chun;Choi, Won-Il;Kim, Choong-Myung;Choi, Yang-Gyu;Kim, Jong-Jin
    • MALSORI
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    • no.53
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    • pp.61-74
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    • 2005
  • In the present study, the intelligibility of the synthesized speech sounds was evaluated by using the psycholinguistic and fMRI techniques. In order to see the difference in recognizing words between the natural and synthesized speech sounds, word regularity and word frequency were varied. The results of Experiment1 and Experiment2 showed that the intelligibility difference of the synthesized speech comes from word regularity. In the case of the synthesized speech, the regular words were recognized slower than the irregular words, and there was smaller activation of the auditory areas in brain for the regular words than for the irregular words.

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Four-Year-Old Children's Counting Skills and Their Mothers' Use of Number Words: The Mediating Role of Children's Number Word Use (4세 유아의 수세기 기술과 어머니의 수 단어 사용: 유아 수 단어 사용의 매개효과)

  • Jihyeon Park;Youjeong Park;Yujin Lee;Sunjung Baik;Sukyoung Choe
    • Korean Journal of Childcare and Education
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    • v.19 no.6
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    • pp.79-95
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    • 2023
  • Objective: This study examines the relationships among four-year-olds' counting skills, their use of number words, and their mothers' use of number words during mother-child free play. Specifically, we assess whether children's use of number words mediates the relationship between their counting skills and their mothers' use of number words during play. Methods: Forty-two 4-year-old children and their mothers were asked to play freely with a given set of toys at their home for 10 minutes. Children also completed a counting skill test. Frequencies of number word use were calculated for mothers and children from transcriptions of the free play. Results: Children's counting skills, the frequency of their number word use, and their mothers' frequency of number word use were positively correlated with each other. Additionally, the frequency of children's number-word use completely mediated the relationship between their counting skills and their mothers' frequency of number-word use. Conclusion/Implications: The results suggest that children's use of number language may play a crucial role in the provision of number-related language input by parents, based on their children's math skills. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

The Differences of Naming by Word Frequency, Length, and Animacy in Nonfluent Aphasic Patients (비유창성 실어증 환자의 단어빈도 및 길이, 생물성에 따른 이름대기 수행의 차이)

  • Kwon, Jung Hee;Choi, Hyun Joo
    • 재활복지
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.171-188
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    • 2016
  • The purpose of this study is to investigate effects of three conditions-words frequency, word length, and animacy-on the performance of naming in nonfluent aphasic patients. 15 nonfluent aphasic patients and 15 normal adults were participated in this study. The words consist only of concrete nouns and confrontational naming test was used. The test consisted of 40 questions and the condition of word were frequency(low-frequency/high-frequency), length(1 syllable/3 syllables) and animacy(animate/inanimate). The result of the study was as follows. First, naming was performed better with high-frequency words than with low-frequency words in both groups. Second, naming was performed better with 1 syllable words than with 3 syllable words in both groups. Third, naming performance depending on animacy did not show significant differences in both groups. These results indicate that compared to animacy of word, word frequency and length have bigger influence on the naming, and the difference by word frequency was more pronounced for nonfluent aphasic patients than for normal adults. The results of this study suggest that target word for the assessment and intervention of nonfluent aphasic patients, words frequency should be considered first in clinical setting.

The characteristics of eye-movement in Korean sentence reading: cluster length, word frequency, and landing position effects (우리 문장 읽기에서 안구 운동의 특성: 어절 길이, 단어 빈도 및 착지점 관련 효과)

  • Koh, Sung-Ryongng;Yoon, Nak-Yeong
    • Korean Journal of Cognitive Science
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    • v.18 no.4
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    • pp.325-350
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    • 2007
  • This study investigated global and local characteristics of eye movement while 16 college students read 48 easy Korean sentences. It was found that readers lusted for about 225ms at the word cluster(eojeol), made a forward saccade of about 3.6 characters to the next word, skipped short and high-frequent words about 25% during the first-pass reading, and regressed backward at 19%. There were also individual differences in readers' pattern of fixation and saccade. In addition, the effects of word cluster length and word frequency and the effects related to landing position were examined. The eyes landed on the center of a word cluster more frequently than on the boundaries. When the eyes landed at the boundaries, the eyes fixated the word cluster again more frequently. The word clusters with high-frequency words were read faster than those with low-frequency words.

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Effects of Word Frequency on a Lenition Process: Evidence from Stop Voicing and /h/ Reduction in Korean

  • Choi, Tae-Hwan;Lim, Nam-Sil;Han, Jeong-Im
    • Speech Sciences
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    • v.13 no.3
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    • pp.35-48
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    • 2006
  • The present study examined whether words with higher frequency have more exposure to the lenition process such as intervocalic stop voicing or /h/ reduction in the production of the Korean speakers. Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 tested if word-internal intervocalic voicing and /h/ reduction occur more often in the words with higher frequency than less frequent words respectively. Results showed that the rate of voicing was not significantly different between the high frequency group and the low frequency group; rather both high and low frequency words were shown to be fully voiced in this prosodic position. However, intervocalic /h/s were deleted more in high frequency words than in low frequency words. Low frequency words showed that other phonetic variants such as [h] and [w] were found more often than in high frequency group. Thus the results of the present study are indefinitive as to the relationship between the word frequency and lenition with the data at hand.

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The Effect of Word Frequency on Resident Education Effectiveness in Rural Field Forums (농촌현장포럼에서 단어의 빈도가 주민교육 효과성에 미치는 영향)

  • Lee, Byungjoon;Yoon, Seongsoo
    • Journal of Korean Society of Rural Planning
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    • v.28 no.3
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    • pp.1-11
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    • 2022
  • In this study, the magnitude of the influence of word frequency on the change of perception of residents before and after resident competency strengthening education in villages where the rural field forum was conducted was analyzed. The results of analyzing the changes in residents' perceptions of the village development project according to the frequency of words are as follows. It was found that talking about surrounding factors had a greater influence than individual factors of keywords. In addition, the frequency of word use had a positive effect on the resident's perception. It was analyzed that items with high awareness of resident prior to resident competency-enhancing education had a low impact.

An Analysis of the Vowel Formants of the Young Males in the Buckeye Corpus (벅아이 코퍼스에서의 젊은 성인 남성의 모음 포먼트 분석)

  • Yoon, Kyu-Chul;Noh, Hye-Uk
    • Phonetics and Speech Sciences
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    • v.4 no.2
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    • pp.41-49
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    • 2012
  • The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, syllabic stress information, the location in a word, location in utterance, speech rate of three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The results indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants. The purpose of this paper is to extract the vowel formants of the ten young male speakers from the Buckeye Corpus of Conversational Speech [1] and to analyze them in comparison to earlier works in terms of various phonetic factors that are expected to affect the realization of the formant distribution. The first two formant frequency values were automatically extracted with a Praat script along with such factors as the place of articulation, the content versus function word information, the syllabic stress information, the location in a word, the location in an utterance, the speech rate of the three consecutive words, and the word frequency in the corpus. The result indicated that the formant patterns from the corpus were very different from those of earlier works although the overall pattern was similar and that the factors were strongly responsible for the realization of the two formants.