Ciekawostka: "I" is the most spoken word in the English language

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. As with the orthographies of most other world languages, written English is broadly standardised. This standardisation began to develop when movable type spread to England in the late 15th century. However, unlike with most languages, there are multiple ways to spell every phoneme, and most letters also represent multiple pronunciations depending on th…

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

The identity of the longest word in English depends on the definition of "word" and of length. Words may be derived naturally from the language's roots or formed by coinage and construction. Additionally, comparisons are complicated because place names may be considered words, technical terms may be arbitrarily long, and the addition of suffixes and prefixes may extend the length of words to create grammatically correct but unused or novel words. Different dictionaries include and omit different words. The length of a word may also be understood in multiple ways. Most commonly, length is based on orthography (conventional spelling rules) and counting the number of written letters. Alternate…

Evidence: 95 • authority: 92

Developmental Changes in Infants’ Ability to Cope with Dialect Variation in Word Segmentation. Towards the end of their first year of life, infants learn to ignore variation in sounds not present, or not functional, in their ambient language. Specifically, overly specified word representations are thought to give way to others with which learners can cope better with indexical variation, such as voice and affect, which are not relevant to word identity. This developmental change may help infants in their second year to more efficiently process the ambient language and thus make rapid gains in vocabulary. One particular kind of variability that infants must accommodate is that of dialectal a…

Evidence: 95 • authority: 92

Native and non-native lexical processing in Mandarin: pinyin and tone representation.. The nature of the Chinese mental lexicon is described in this theoretical paper, with a particular focus on the way in which Mandarin is represented and processed, especially with regard to tonal information. Because an alphabetic script (i.e., pinyin) is adopted in China at the earliest stages of reading acquisition, an account is given of the way in which alphabetic orthography is processed, using English as the example. Following from this, a framework for thinking about the processes involved in learning to read Chinese is presented and the impact of pinyin is considered. In particular, it is argued t…

Evidence: 92 • authority: 88

Using natural language processing to characterize word frequency by modality: Introducing the Templex Spoken English Word Frequency Dataset. It is well established that how often we encounter a word (i.e., its frequency) influences how quickly we recognize and respond to that word (Brysbaert et al., 2018; Gorman, 1961; Monsell et al., 1989). In recent decades, advances in computing power have lowered barriers surrounding the collection and analysis of spoken language data. In this paper, we used one such advance, natural language processing, to derive word frequency data from a large spoken English corpus representative of a variety of communicative contexts and topics. We provide an overvi…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 88

Frequency Over Semantic Richness: word recognition in non-native English speakers. Recognition of a word and its meaning benefits from the sensorimotor information about concepts. However, this phenomenon has been underexplored in second language (L2) speakers who may rely on more “shallow” representations. Using a megastudy dataset, we investigate how sensorimotor strength affects L1 and L2 word recognition performance. Bayesian hierarchical regressions revealed that variables associated with physical sensations (interoceptive strength, motor action) and communication experience (head or mouth movement, auditory strength) produced strong effects in both groups. On the other hand, variables…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 88

Frequency Over Semantic Richness: word recognition in non-native English speakers. Recognition of a word and its meaning benefits from the sensorimotor information about concepts. However, this phenomenon has been underexplored in second language (L2) speakers who may rely on more “shallow” representations. Using a megastudy dataset, we investigate how sensorimotor strength affects L1 and L2 word recognition performance. Bayesian hierarchical regressions revealed that variables associated with physical sensations (interoceptive strength, motor action) and communication experience (head or mouth movement, auditory strength) produced strong effects in both groups. On the other hand, variables…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 92

Deaf Child Signers' Reading Behaviors Are Predicted by Their Bilingual (Signed and Spoken) Vocabularies: Evidence from Eye-Tracking.. Deaf children who acquire a signed language at home and at school prior to learning to read are a unique group of developing bilinguals. They are first-language users of a signed language (e.g., American Sign Language; ASL) and second-language users of the written form of the ambient spoken language (e.g., English). Because signed languages do not possess orthographies that are widely used, deaf readers typically read in their second language. This profile stands in contrast to hearing bilingual readers, who read in their first language and, sometimes, their…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 92

When control words lose control: emergence of top-down processing effects in Spanish spoken word recognition.. Research on cross-dialectal spoken word recognition suggests integrated processing of social and linguistic information, enabled by the encoding of fine-grained sociophonetic detail. Asymmetries in encoding strength have also been documented, especially concerning idealized or socially meaningful variants. To date, the literature has demonstrated discrepancies between immediate and long-term processing, the latter being understudied, along with an overwhelming focus on English varieties. The current study therefore examined immediate and long-term processing of three /s/ variants i…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 72

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family that emerged in early medieval England and has since become a global lingua franca. The language is named after the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who migrated to Britain after the end of Roman rule. English is the most spoken language in the world, primarily due to the global influence of the British Empire (succeeded by the Commonwealth of Nations) and the rise of the United States. It is the most widely learned second language in the world, with more second‑language speakers than native speakers. However, English is only the third‑most spoken native language, after Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. English is eithe…

Evidence: 80 • authority: 72

Studies that estimate and rank the most common words in English examine texts written in English. Perhaps the most comprehensive such analysis is one that was conducted against the Oxford English Corpus (OEC), a massive text corpus that is written in the English language. In total, the texts in the Oxford English Corpus contain more than 2 billion words. The OEC includes a wide variety of writing samples, such as literary works, novels, academic journals, newspapers, magazines, Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, blogs, chat logs, and emails. Another English corpus that has been used to study word frequency is the Brown Corpus, which was compiled by researchers at Brown University in the 1960s…

Evidence: 59 • authority: 88

Most Frequent Multi-Word Expressions in English for Banking: A Corpus-Based Diachronic Study. The aim of the paper is to perform diachronic research in one segment of Business English – English for Banking to check the diachronic stability of its vocabulary. Therefore, an analysis of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in 15 syntactic categories in annual reports of four biggest US banks for fiscal years 2006 and 2021 was made. More precisely, the diachronic changes comprising the span of time of 15 years were analysed in both the frequency of the occurrence of MWEs across the 15 analysed syntactic categories and in their percentage relationship to the scope of the corpora. The corpus analysis ma…