This suggests that Tanzanian schoolchildren were capable of fully understanding the Kiswahili translated version without altering the meaning of the questions and that the Kiswahili and English frequency inventories are comparable.
We used 120 single words: 30 Japanese high-frequency words (Jpn_HF), 30 Japanese low-frequency words (Jpn_LF), 30 English high-frequency words (Eng_HF), and 30 English low-frequency words (Eng_LF).
Words for the secondary task were randomly selected from the MRC Psycholinguistic Database (Coltheart, 1981), based on the parameters of length (4 7 letters), syllables (3 or fewer), and frequency in the English language (frequency range of 15 100).
A comparison of the children's ratings of their semantic knowledge of the word stimuli among the 4 repetition tasks is shown in Figure 2 A. As exhibited in the figure, mean semantic knowledge of the Japanese high-frequency words (96%) was much higher than that of the Japanese low-frequency words (12%), the English high-frequency words (42%) and the English low-frequency words (8%).
There was no difference in English word frequency or log-transformed frequency for cognate and noncognate items.
Importantly, the words in each corpus occurred in their respective languages with approximately equal token frequency (Spanish mean frequency = 45.92 occurrences per million (sd = 1779.14); English mean frequency = 40.76 occurrences per million (sd = 724.160); t(38678) =.37, p =.71) further attesting to the comparability of the two corpora.
From Tanzania, Masalu et al [ 13] reported that the English OIDP frequency questionnaire fulfilled the psychometrical requirements underlying the scoring of the eight items and was applicable to adults attending higher education in Dar es Salaam.
The experiment used the same stimulus string conditions (words, pseudowords, symbol strings) as [ 1], but while the symbol-strings were identical, the German words were translated to English (high-frequency words in both languages), and the German pseudowords were replaced by regular English pseudowords.
The law was originally proposed by American linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902 50) for the frequency of usage of different words in the English language; this frequency is given approximately by f(r) ≅ 0.1/r.
By comparing reading activation for pseudowords, low-frequency irregularly spelled English words and low-frequency regularly spelled English words, we have replicated the dissociation of 3 different reading systems that were previously identified by Mechelli et al. (2005).
