A naturalistic study of the word frequency effect in episodic recognition

Abstract

In order to separate the effects of experience from other characteristics of word frequency (e.g., orthographic distinctiveness), computer science and psychology students raged their experience with computer science technical items and nontechnical items from a wide range of word frequencies prior to being tested for recognition memory of the rated items. For nontechnical items, there was a curvilinear relationship between recognition accuracy and word frequency for both groups of students. The usual superiority of low-frequency words was demonstrated and high-frequency words were recognized least well. For technical items, a similar curvilinear relationship was evident for the psychology st..