Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas

Marc Brysbaert, Paweł Mandera, Samantha F McCormick, Emmanuel Keuleers

    Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

    139 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    We present word prevalence data for 61,858 English words. Word prevalence refers to the number of people who know the word. The measure was obtained on the basis of an online crowdsourcing study involving over 220,000 people. Word prevalence data are useful for gauging the difficulty of words and, as such, for matching stimulus materials in experimental conditions or selecting stimulus materials for vocabulary tests. Word prevalence also predicts word processing times, over and above the effects of word frequency, word length, similarity to other words, and age of acquisition, in line with previous findings in the Dutch language.

    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)467-479
    JournalBehavior Research Methods
    Volume51
    Early online date2 Jul 2018
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2018

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