The Relations of Stuttering to Word Length and Word Frequency

1966 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 584-589 ◽  
Author(s):  
George A. Soderberg
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Word Lists

Twenty stutterers recorded nine 10-word lists in the presence of a single listener. The word lists were composed of combinations of three levels of word length and three levels of word frequency. An attempt was made to equate the word lists for stress of initial syllables, grammatical function, and initial sounds of words. The results agree with those of previous studies that have found a significantly greater frequency of stuttering to be associated with increases of word length and decreases of word frequency. However, the findings suggested that word length was the more potent of the two variables in effect on the frequency of stuttering.

Disfluency Behavior of Elementary-School Stutterers and Nonstutterers: Loci of Instances of Disfluency

1969 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 308-318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dean E. Williams ◽  
Franklin H. Silverman ◽  
Joseph A. Kools
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Sixth Grade ◽  
First Grade ◽  
Grammatical Function ◽  
Initial Phoneme ◽  
Speech Task ◽  
Sentence Position ◽  
Word Attributes

One hundred fifty-two children from kindergarten and grades one through six, 76 stutterers and 76 nonstutterers, performed a speech task. Each of the kindergarten and first-grade children repeated 10 sentences after the experimenter, and each of the second- through sixth-grade children read a passage. All words judged to have been spoken disfluently were analyzed for the presence of each of Brown’s four word attributes—initial phoneme, grammatical function, sentence position, and word length. Disfluencies were not randomly distributed in the speech of these children. For both stutterers and nonstutterers, disfluencies occurred most frequently on words possessing the same attributes as those reported by Brown to be troublesome for adult stutterers. The findings of this study demonstrate the essential similarity in the loci of instances of disfluency in the speech of (1) children and adults and (2) stutterers and nonstutterers.

Picture-naming agreement in monolingulas and biliguals

1994 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith P. Goggin ◽  
Patricia Estrada ◽  
Ronald P. Villarreal
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Picture Naming ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Age Of Acquisition ◽  
Language Skill ◽  
Frequency Word ◽  
Line Drawings ◽  
Name Agreement ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTName agreement in Spanish and English in response to 264 pictures was assessed in monolinguals and in bilinguals, who varied in rated skill in the two languages. Most of the pictures were adapted from a standardized set of line drawings of common objects (Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980). Name agreement decreased as language skill decreased, and agreement was lower when labels were given in Spanish rather than in English. The relationship between name agreement and word frequency, word length, and (in the case of English) age of acquisition was assessed; both word frequency and word length were found to be related to agreement. Modal responses given by monolingual subjects were nearly identical in the two languages, and the types of non-modal responses were affected by both naming language and language skill.

scholarly journals ZIPF'S LAW AND RANDOM TEXTS

2002 ◽  
Vol 05 (01) ◽  
pp. 1-6 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAMON FERRER i CANCHO ◽  
RICARD V. SOLÉ
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Power Law ◽  
Word Length ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Zipf’S Law ◽  
Strict Sense ◽  
A Priori Information ◽  
Zipf's Law ◽  
Priori Information ◽  
Random Text

Random-text models have been proposed as an explanation for the power law relationship between word frequency and rank, the so-called Zipf's law. They are generally regarded as null hypotheses rather than models in the strict sense. In this context, recent theories of language emergence and evolution assume this law as a priori information with no need of explanation. Here, random texts and real texts are compared through (a) the so-called lexical spectrum and (b) the distribution of words having the same length. It is shown that real texts fill the lexical spectrum much more efficiently and regardless of the word length, suggesting that the meaningfulness of Zipf's law is high.

scholarly journals Please stop using word frequency data that are likely to be word length effects in disguise

2003 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 479-479 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Brysbaert ◽  
Denis Drieghe
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Frequency Data ◽  
Human Data ◽  
Length Effects

Reichle et al. claim to successfully simulate a frequency effect of 60% on skipping rate in human data, whereas the original article reports an effect of only 4%. We suspect that the deviation is attributable to the length of the words in the different conditions, which implies that E-Z Reader is wrong in its conception of eye guidance between words.

A Neural Signature of Phonological Access: Distinguishing the Effects of Word Frequency from Familiarity and Length in Overt Picture Naming

2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 617-631 ◽  
Author(s):  
William W. Graves ◽  
Thomas J. Grabowski ◽  
Sonya Mehta ◽  
Jean K. Gordon
Keyword(s):  
Word Frequency ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Inferior Frontal Gyrus ◽  
Word Production ◽  
Frequency Effect ◽  
Word Frequency Effect ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Processing Cost ◽  
Left Posterior ◽  
Whole Word

Cognitive models of word production correlate the word frequency effect (i.e., the fact that words which appear with less frequency take longer to produce) with an increased processing cost to activate the whole-word (lexical) phonological representation. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects produced overt naming responses to photographs of animals and manipulable objects that had high name agreement but were of varying frequency, with the purpose of identifying neural structures participating specifically in activating whole-word phonological representations, as opposed to activating lexical semantic representations or articulatory-motor routines. Blood oxygen level-dependent responses were analyzed using a parametric approach based on the frequency with which each word produced appears in the language. Parallel analyses were performed for concept familiarity and word length, which provided indices of semantic and articulatory loads. These analyses permitted us to identify regions related to word frequency alone, and therefore, likely to be related specifically to activation of phonological word forms. We hypothesized that the increased processing cost of producing lower-frequency words would correlate with activation of the left posterior inferotemporal (IT) cortex, the left posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG), and the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Scan-time response latencies demonstrated the expected word frequency effect. Analysis of the fMRI data revealed that activity in the pSTG was modulated by frequency but not word length or concept familiarity. In contrast, parts of IT and IFG demonstrated conjoint frequency and familiarity effects, and parts of both primary motor regions demonstrated conjoint effects of frequency and word length. The results are consistent with a model of word production in which lexical-semantic and lexical-phonological information are accessed by overlapping neural systems within posterior and anterior language-related cortices, with pSTG specifically involved in accessing lexical phonology.

Lexical and Sublexical Components of Age-related Changes in Neural Activation during Visual Word Identification

2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 475-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wythe L. Whiting ◽  
David J. Madden ◽  
Linda K. Langley ◽  
Laura L. Denny ◽  
Timothy G. Turkington ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Lexical Decision ◽  
Word Frequency ◽  
Word Length ◽  
Word Identification ◽  
Temporal Cortex ◽  
Visual Word ◽  
Neural Activation ◽  
Age Related ◽  
Visual Word Identification

Positron emission tomography data (Madden, Langley, et al., 2002) were analyzed to investigate adult age differences in the relation between neural activation and the lexical (word frequency) and sublexical (word length) components of visual word identification. The differential influence of these components on reaction time (RT) for word/nonword discrimination (lexical decision) was generally similar for the two age groups, with word frequency accounting for a greater proportion of lexical decision RT variance relative to word length. The influence of word length on RT, however, was relatively greater for older adults. Activation in regions of the ventral occipito-temporal cortex was related to the RT changes associated with word frequency and length for older adults, but not for younger adults. Specifically, older adults' frequency effects were related to activation in both anterior (Brodmann's area [BA] 37) and posterior (BAs 17 and 18) regions of the occipito-temporal pathway, whereas word length effects were only associated with posterior activation (BA 17). We conclude that aging affects the neural mechanisms supporting word identification performance although behavioral measures of this ability are generally constant as a function of age.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document