title: SUBTLEX-UK: a new and improved word frequency database for British English.
abstract: We present word frequencies based on subtitles of British television programmes. We show that the SUBTLEX-UK word frequencies explain more of the variance in the lexical decision times of the British Lexicon Project than the word frequencies based on the British National Corpus and the SUBTLEX-US frequencies. In addition to the word form frequencies, we also present measures of contextual diversity part-of-speech specific word frequencies, word frequencies in children programmes, and word bigram frequencies, giving researchers of British English access to the full range of norms recently made available for other languages. Finally, we introduce a new measure of word frequency, the Zipf scale, which we hope will stop the current misunderstandings of the word frequency effect.
authors.affiliation: a School of Psychology , University of Nottingham , Nottingham , UK.
authors.forename: Walter J B
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: van Heuven
authors.forename: Pawel
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Mandera
authors.forename: Emmanuel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Keuleers
authors.forename: Marc
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brysbaert
mesh_terms: D016208:Databases, Factual / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D013223:Statistics as Topic; D006113:United Kingdom; D014825:Vocabulary
keywords: Visual word recognition; Word frequency; Zipf scale.