( 2001) observed that these subjective norms explained unique variance above and beyond objective corpus frequencies for lexical decision and naming tasks. For this reason, some studies have used familiarity ratings of words as a more accurate reflection of the actual exposure to certain words for a specific group of readers (e.g., Balota, Pilotti, & Cortese, 2001 Kuperman & Van Dyke, 2013). Next to the possibility of individual differences in the relative frequency for specific words due to differences in experience with a specific vocabulary, it is possible that individuals who are at different stages in the language acquisition process, or, more broadly, have a differing amount of total language exposure, may have different relative frequencies for words. This is because differences in subjective frequency, in particular semantic categories, would be cancelled out by the use of stimuli from multiple domains. Still, in experiments where words from different semantic domains (for example tools or clothing) are used as stimuli, such differences in relative frequency would in principle not lead to systematic differences in the FE between individuals. The differences in the FE size would disappear when a measure of actual exposure or subjective frequency (e.g., Connine, Mullennix, Shernoff, & Yelen, 1990 Gernsbacher, 1984) is used. In other words, corpus word frequencies may under- or overestimate subjective word frequencies, which can lead to a difference in the size of the FE when corpus word frequencies are used in analyses. Solomon and Howes ( 1951) have previously emphasized that word counts from text corpora are based on an arbitrary sample of the language and that there may be individual variation in the relative frequency of exposure to specific words. While corpus word frequencies are a tremendously useful proxy measure for relative exposure, it should not be forgotten that the relative frequency of a word in a text corpus is not necessarily equal to the relative frequency of exposure to that word for a particular individual. These objective corpus word frequencies are supposed to reflect the average number of exposures to certain words of an experienced reader. Mostly, corpus frequencies are expressed as relative values because these can be used independent of corpus size. The number of exposures to a certain word is often operationalized as the count of word occurrences in language corpora like the Subtlex database (Keuleers et al., 2010). The collection and evaluation of frequency norms based on text corpora is central to psycholinguistic research (e.g., Brysbaert & New, 2009 Keuleers, Brysbaert, & New, 2010 Van Heuven, Mandera, Keuleers, & Brysbaert, 2014). We present this account and argue that not all groups of bilinguals necessarily have lower L1 exposure than monolinguals do and, in line with Kuperman and Van Dyke (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 39 (3), 802-823, 2013), that individual vocabulary size and language exposure change the accuracy of the relative corpus word frequencies and thereby determine the size of the FEs in the same way for all participants. This means that no qualitative difference in language processing between monolingual, bilingual L1, or bilingual L2 is necessary to explain reading behavior. Our results are consistent with an account of bilingual language processing that assumes an integrated mental lexicon with exposure as the main determiner for lexical entrenchment. The FE in both L1 and L2 reading decreased with increasing L1 proficiency, but it was not affected by L2 proficiency. Unbalanced bilinguals and monolinguals show a similarly sized FE in their mother tongue (L1), but for bilinguals the FE is considerably larger in their second language (L2) than in their L1. We analyzed single fixation durations on content words for participants reading an entire novel. This paper presents the first systematic examination of the monolingual and bilingual frequency effect (FE) during natural reading.
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