Adding part-of-speech information to the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies

Behav Res Methods. 2012 Dec;44(4):991-7. doi: 10.3758/s13428-012-0190-4.

Abstract

The SUBTLEX-US corpus has been parsed with the CLAWS tagger, so that researchers have information about the possible word classes (parts-of-speech, or PoSs) of the entries. Five new columns have been added to the SUBTLEX-US word frequency list: the dominant (most frequent) PoS for the entry, the frequency of the dominant PoS, the frequency of the dominant PoS relative to the entry's total frequency, all PoSs observed for the entry, and the respective frequencies of these PoSs. Because the current definition of lemma frequency does not seem to provide word recognition researchers with useful information (as illustrated by a comparison of the lemma frequencies and the word form frequencies from the Corpus of Contemporary American English), we have not provided a column with this variable. Instead, we hope that the full list of PoS frequencies will help researchers to collectively determine which combination of frequencies is the most informative.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Humans
  • Language*
  • Psycholinguistics / methods
  • Terminology as Topic
  • Vocabulary*
  • Word Processing