SUBTLEX-UK: a new and improved word frequency database for British English

van Heuven, Walter J.B.; Mandera, Pawel; Keuleers, Emmanuel; Brysbaert, Marc

Abstract

We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that the
SUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times of
the British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and the
SUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencies, we also present measures of contextual
diversity part-of-speech specific word frequencies, word frequencies in children programmes,
and word bigram frequencies, giving researchers of British English access to the full range of norms
recently made available for other languages. Finally, we introduce a new measure of word frequency,
the Zipf scale, which we hope will stop the current misunderstandings of the word frequency effect.

Citation

van Heuven, W. J., Mandera, P., Keuleers, E., & Brysbaert, M. (2014). SUBTLEX-UK: a new and improved word frequency database for British English. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.850521

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Jan 13, 2014
• Deposit Date: Apr 11, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 11, 2014
• Journal: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
• Print ISSN: 1747-0218
• Electronic ISSN: 1747-0226
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2013.850521
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/721845
• Publisher URL: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17470218.2013.850521