Examining the origins of the word frequency effect in episodic recognition memory and its relationship to the word frequency effect in lexical memory

Two experiments investigated Estes and Maddox’ theory (2002) that word frequency mirror effect in episodic recognition memory is due to word likeness rather than frequency of experience with a word. In Experiment 1, sixteen first year psychology students at the University of Newcastle studied lists of high and low frequency words crossed with high-neighbourhood-density and low-neighbourhood-density words and were given an episodic recognition test and asked to rate words as new or old and provide ratings of confidence according to a three point scale with six possible responses: sure old, probably old, possibly old, possibly new, probably new and sure new. Experiment 2 included twenty-three first year psychology students at the University of Newcastle who were tested using lexical decision task lists of words and nonwords. Testing was undertaken on a computer that presented the stimuli and recorded the participants’ responses using a program written in Turbo Pascal 6.0 with millisecond accurate timing. The dataset contains one Microsoft Excel file in .xls format containing data for Experiments 1 and 2.