From: aminoff@isr.harvard.edu (Alexander G. Aminoff)
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive
Subject: word frequency database results
Date: 8 Jan 93 19:39:50 GMT
Article-I.D.: burrhus.1993Jan8.193950.22100
Followup-To: sci.cognitive
Organization: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA

My search for a database of word frequency norms turned up one substantial
file, the MRC Psycholinguistic Database Machine Readable Dictionary.
Thanks to all those who sent me pointers.

I was disappointed at not being able to find word frequency norms
more recent than 1961 (when the Kucera & Francis corpus was put
together). If anyone knows of a more recent list for written
english, please let me know.

The MRC Psycholinguistic database is a compilation of information from
a number of different sources, including the Kucera&Francis(1963)
frequency norms, the Thorndike & Lorge (1944) frequency norms,
the Brown (1984) spoken frequency norms, Toglia & Battig (1978)
semantic word norms, the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary,
and several others. C source code is supplied for a couple of
simple programs to extract information from the database.
The database itself is in plain ascii. Each record consists of
a number of fixed-width fields with no separation followed by
some variable-width fields separated by the | character.

The database contains about 150,000 entries. However, most
of the psycholinguistic information fields are available
for only a small subset.

The database contains the following information for each entry:

name	    property				       occurrences

NLET	     Number of letters in the word		 150837
NPHON	     Number of phonemes in the word		  38438
NSYL	     Number of syllables in the word		  89402
K-F-FREQ     Kucera and Francis written frequency	  29778
K-F-NCATS    Kucera and Francis number of categories	  29778
K-F-NSAMP    Kucera and Francis number of samples	  29778
T-L-FREQ     Thorndike-Lorge frequency			  25308
BROWN-FREQ   Brown verbal frequency			  14529
FAM	     Familiarity				  9392
CONC	     Concreteness				   8228
IMAG	     Imagery				       	   9240
MEANC	     Mean Colerado Meaningfulness		   5450
MEANP	     Mean Pavio Meaningfulness			   1504
AOA	     Age of Acquisition				   3503
TQ2	     Type					  44976
WTYPE	     Part of Speech				 150769
PDWTYPE	     primary Part of Speech			  38390
ALPHSYL	     whether the word is an abbreviation	  15938
STATUS	     Status(obsolete,jargon,poetic,foreign...)	  89550
VAR	     Varient Phoneme				   1445
CAP	     Written Capitalised			   4585
IRREG	     Irregular Plural				  23111
WORD	     the actual word				 150837
PHON	     Phonetic Transcription			  38420
DPHON	     Edited Phonetic Transcription		 136982
STRESS	     Stress Pattern				  38390

This database can be anonymous FTP'd from the Oxford Text Archive
on black.ox.ac.uk. The path to it is ota/dicts/1054. The main
database file is 11 megs. If you can't or don't want to ftp something
that size (it took me about 10 minutes) inquiries about the
Oxford Text Archive should go to archive@black.ox.ac.uk.

I'll be happy to answer any further questions by email. I would
especially advise anyone wh wants to use this to create stimulus
lists for stem completion experiments to talk to me.

-- 
	Alexander Aminoff		Harvard University
	Research Assistant		Department of Psychology
	aminoff@isr.harvard.edu		33 Kirkland st. room 855
	W: (617) 495-3856		Cambridge, MA 02138
Newsgroups: sci.cognitive