title: Case-sensitive letter and bigram frequency counts from large-scale English corpora.
abstract: We tabulated upper- and lowercase letter frequency using several large-scale English corpora (approximately 183 million words in total). The results indicate that the relative frequencies for upper- and lowercase letters are not equivalent. We report a letter-naming experiment in which uppercase frequency predicted response time to uppercase letters better than did lowercase frequency. Tables of case-sensitive letter and bigram frequency are provided, including common nonalphabetic characters. Because subjects are sensitive to frequency relationships among letters, we recommend that experimenters use case-sensitive counts when constructing stimuli from letters.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. mike@minerva.psyc.queen.ca
authors.forename: Michael N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Jones
authors.forename: D J K
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Mewhort
mesh_terms: D003463:Cues; D005403:Fixation, Ocular; D006801:Humans; D008037:Linguistics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010507:Periodicity; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary