ERIC Number: EJ1141636
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2017-May
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0364-0213
EISSN: N/A
Social Media and Language Processing: How Facebook and Twitter Provide the Best Frequency Estimates for Studying Word Recognition
Herdagdelen, AmaƧ; Marelli, Marco
Cognitive Science, v41 n4 p976-995 May 2017
Corpus-based word frequencies are one of the most important predictors in language processing tasks. Frequencies based on conversational corpora (such as movie subtitles) are shown to better capture the variance in lexical decision tasks compared to traditional corpora. In this study, we show that frequencies computed from social media are currently the best frequency-based estimators of lexical decision reaction times (up to 3.6% increase in explained variance). The results are robust (observed for Twitter- and Facebook-based frequencies on American English and British English datasets) and are still substantial when we control for corpus size.
Descriptors: Social Media, Language Processing, Word Recognition, Word Frequency, Reaction Time, Prediction, Cognitive Science, Psycholinguistics, Correlation, Syllables
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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