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

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

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Authors

Pawel Mandera

Emmanuel Keuleers

Marc Brysbaert



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 Mar 28, 2024
Journal Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology
Print ISSN 1747-0218
Electronic ISSN 1747-0218
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

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