Word Frequency and Word Difficulty: A Comparison of Counts in Four Corpora

Abstract

This article compares word counts made using four different collections of text, including one based on collections of electronic text For each of the collections, standard word frequency indices were computed and compared with a carefully developed list of words ranked in order of difficulty as determined by vocabulary tests Correlations between the word frequency indices and word difficulty ranks show that word frequencies for all four corpora are highly correlated with word difficulty Despite these high correlations, the results show also that the difficulty of some words is not estimated accurately by word frequency The reasons for disparities between word frequency and word difficulty are not clear The high correlations obtained for the corpus based on electronic text suggest that this method of text sampling has potential but that caution is advisable in conducting such collections