Perceived frequency of concrete and abstract words

Abstract

Studies are reported which show that concrete and abstract words of equal objective frequency (based on available , word counts) are not perceived as being equal. The abstract word has greater perceived frequency than the concrete word. The judged variety of contexts in which a word appears correlates very highly with perceived frequency. The results have relevance to the design of learning studies in which concrete and abstract words are used. and also to the interpretation of such experiments.