Word frequency and semantic violations: Investigating the effect of word frequency on the detection of semantic anomalies

Abstract

Although previous research suggests that high-frequency words are processed faster, Van den Hazelkamp (2018) found that they were responded to later in a semantic violation detection task. The present study examines the effect of word frequency on the detection of semantically anomalous words and the confirmation of semantically correct words. In a negative semantic judgment task, participants had to press a button when they detected a semantic anomaly, while in the positive task, they were asked to press the button when the target word was used correctly. Although the effect of word frequency was hypothesized to be task-dependent, no relation between response time and word frequency was found in either of the tasks. The findings are compared to previous research and suggestions for further studies are made.