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Subjective frequency: A window to the bilingual lexicon?
by Tanja Anstatt
Word frequency is a factor of very high importance for the organisation of the mental lexicon: the processing of words and the acquisition of words in L1 as well as in L2 are tuned to their frequency (cf. Ellis 2002, Brysbaert & New 2009). Moreover, word frequency plays a role in language attrition (cf. Schmid & Köpcke 2009).
Speakers have very good abilities to estimate the frequency of words in their L1, as has been shown by various studies (cf. Gordon 1985, Balota et al. 2001, Reid & Marslen-Wilson 2003). The estimates of speakers, i.e., the “subjective frequency” of words, were shown to explain the behavior in psycholinguistic tests (e.g., lexical decision tasks) much better than the “objective” frequency, measured by counting their occurrences in corpora, does (cf. Gordon 1985), for they reflect much better the oral usage of language. However, at the present not much is known about frequency estimates of bilingual speakers, and nothing is known about those of heritage speakers.
In my talk I will present frequency estimates of Russian verbs made by bilingual speakers of two types and by monolinguals. I will show that the correlation of the “subjective” estimates to “objective” word frequency in texts is mainly the same in the tested groups, and that the estimates of the bilingual speakers generally correspond to those of the monolinguals. This means that the tested heritage speakers of Russian are as “good” in estimating verb frequency as monolinguals are. At the same time, there are some particular differences between the groups, which will be questioned with respect to individual biographic features of the included heritage speakers. In my summary I will discuss perspectives, advantages and limitations of the method of measuring Subjective Frequency for investigating the Bilingual Lexicon.