- University of Tübingen Germany
ABSTRACTBackground: Frequency of occurrence is a strong predictor of lexical processing across modalities and experimental paradigms. However, frequency is part of a large set of collinear predictors including not only frequencies collected from different registers, but also a wide range of other lexical properties such as length, neighbourhood density, measures of valence, arousal, and dominance, semantic diversity, dispersion, age of acquisition, and measures grounded in discrimination learning.Aims: The aim of this study is to provide a critical examination of these variables, the sources on which they are based, the way they are calculated and evaluated, and their potential causal relations.Main Contribution: We show that age of acquisition ratings and subtitle frequencies constitute (reconstructed) genres that favour frequent use for very different subsets of words. As a consequence of the very different ways in which collinear variables profile as a function of genre, the fit between these variables...