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Article: Frequency characteristics of American sign language
- Article from:
- Sign Language Studies
- Article date:
- January 1, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright American Annals of the Deaf Winter 2003. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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THE PRIMARY factor affecting spoken language processing of individual words is the frequency of occurrence. For example, in a word recognition task, listeners respond more quickly to frequent words (e.g., dog) than to infrequent ones (e.g., hound; Kawamoto et al. 1999). Similarly, speakers make fewer errors when naming highfrequency words than low-frequency ones presented to only one visual field (Scott and Hellige 1998). A typical error that second language learners make involves replacing infrequent verbs with frequent ones (Lennon 1998). Word frequency also affects phonological and grammatical processing. For example, high-frequency words with grammatical suffixes (e.g., -ed, -ing) are ...