Assessing the usefulness of google books’ word frequencies for psycholinguistic research on word processing

• Main Authors: Marc eBrysbaert, Emmanuel eKeuleers, Boris eNew
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Frontiers Media S.A. 2011-03-01
• Series: Frontiers in Psychology
• Subjects: word recognition; Google Books ngrams; lexical decision; subtitle word frequencies; subtlex; word frequency
• Online Access: http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00027/full

In this Perspective Article we assess the usefulness of Google’s new word frequencies for word recognition research (lexical decision and word naming). We find that, despite the massive corpus on which the Google estimates are based (131 billion words from books published in the United States alone), the Google American English frequencies explain 11% less of the variance in the lexical decision times from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., 2007) than the SUBTLEX-US word frequencies, based on a corpus of 51 million words from film and television subtitles. Further analyses indicate that word frequencies derived from recent books (published after 2000) are better predictors of word processing times than frequencies based on the full corpus, and that word frequencies based on fiction books predict word processing times better than word frequencies based on the full corpus. The most predictive word frequencies from Google still do not explain more of the variance in word recognition times of undergraduate students and old adults than the subtitle-based word frequencies.