Table 1.
Mean (and standard deviation) of the lexical characteristics of critical words
| Word | Length | Frequency
|
Concreteness | Imageability | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kucera & Francis (Raw) | Kucera & Francis (Log) | Log HAL | CoCA | ||||
| Pre-target | |||||||
| High constraint | 3.5 (1.8) | 18,534 (25,050) | 276 (81) | 295 (100) | |||
| Low constraint | 3.0 (1.4) | 31,543 (29,832) | 246 (53) | 259 (75) | |||
| Target | |||||||
| Expected | 4.8 (1.2) | 116 (163) | 4.09 (1.24) | 10.07 (1.48) | 9.81 (1.46) | 523 (104) | 546 (86) |
| Unexpected | 5.7 (2.0) | 79 (125) | 3.43 (1.62) | 9.17 (1.79) | 9.61 (1.42) | 508 (104) | 530 (81) |
| Anomalous | 5.3 (1.4) | 82 (112) | 3.54 (1.44) | 9.33 (1.52) | 9.59 (1.22) | 530 (86) | 534 (72) |
| Low constraint | 5.5 (2.0) | 163 (405) | 4.31 (1.24) | 10.07 (1.47) | 10.21 (1.32) | 502 (102) | 533 (79) |
| Post-target | |||||||
| High constraint | 5.1 (1.4) | 4,711 (7,818) | 239 (37) | 263 (50) | |||
| Low constraint | 5.4 (1.3) | 1,512 (2,278) | 282 (102) | 324 (103) | |||
Note. Log HAL frequency measures are from the English Lexicon Project; CoCA are from the Corpus of Contemporary American English