WORD-FREQUENCY AND WORD DIFFICULTY - A COMPARISON OF COUNTS IN 4 CORPORA

This article compares word counts made using four differ-ent collectio ns of text, including one based on collections of electronic text. For each of the collections, standard word frequency indices were compute d and compared with a carefully developed list of words ranked in olde r of difficulty as determined by vocabulary tests. Correlations betwee n the word frequency indices and word difficulty ranks show that word frequencies for all four corpora are highly correlated with word diffi culty. Despite these high correlations, the results show also that the difficulty of some words is not estimated accurately by word frequenc y. The reasons for disparities between word frequency and word difficu lty are not clear. The high correlations obtained for the corpus based on electronic text suggest that this method of text sampling has pote ntial, but that caution is advisable in conducting such collections.