Cover not available

Article published In: Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 5:2 (2022) ► pp.171–205

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
EPUB logo with download linkDownload EPUB
authorization required

What do (most of) our dispersion measures measure (most)? Dispersion?

 | University of California, Santa Barbara, USA | JLU Giessen
Published online: 30 November 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.21029.gri
Abstract
This paper discusses the degree to which most of the most widely-used measures of dispersion in corpus linguistics are not particularly valid in the sense of actually measuring dispersion rather than some amalgam of a lot of frequency and a little dispersion. The paper demonstrates these issues on the basis of data from a variety of corpora. I then outline how to design a dispersion measure that only measures dispersion and show that (i) it indeed measures information that is different from frequency in an intuitive way and (ii) has a higher degree of predictive power of lexical decision times from the MALD database than nearly all other measures in nearly all corpora tested.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A brief recap: G2 reacts more to frequency than to association
  • 3.Dispersion measure: What do they measure and how?
    • 3.1Existing measures
    • 3.2A new measure: Motivation and development
    • 3.3Perspective 1: DPnofreq measures dispersion, not frequency
    • 3.4Perspective 2: DPnofreq helps predicting external data
  • 4.Two short excurses
    • 4.1Excursus 1 rangenofreq
    • 4.2Excursus 2: fast bowler vs. fast food
  • 5.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
References (34)
References
Adelman, James S., Gordon D. A. Brown, & José F. Quesada. 2006. Contextual Diversity, not word frequency, determines word-naming and lexical decision times. Psychological Science 19(9). 814–823. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald. 2008. Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics with R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baayen, R. Harald, Petar Milin, & Michael Ramscar. 2016. Frequency in lexical processing. Aphasiaology 30(11). 1174–1220. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Balota, David A. & Daniel H. Spieler. 1998. The utility of item level analyses in model evaluation: a reply to Seidenberg and Plaut. Psychological Science 9(3). 238–240. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bestgen, Yves & Sylviane Granger. 2009. Quantifying the development of phraseological competence in L2 English writing: An automated approach. Journal of Second Language Writing 261. 28–41. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc & Boris New. 2009. Moving beyond Kučera and Francis: A critical evaluation of current word frequency norms and the introduction of a new and improved word frequency measure for American English. Behavior Research Methods 41(4). 977–990. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brysbaert, Marc, Pawel Mandera, Samantha F. McCormick, & Emmanuel Keuleers. 2019. Word prevalence norms for 62,000 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods 511. 467–479. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Carroll, John B. 1970. An alternative to Juilland’s usage coefficient for lexical frequencies and a proposal for a standard frequency index. Computer Studies in the Humanities and Verbal Behaviour 3(2). 61–65.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Durrant, Phil & Norbert Schmitt. 2009. To what extent do native and non-native writers make use of collocations? International Review of Applied Linguistics 471. 157–177. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C. 2007a. Language acquisition as rational contingency learning. Applied Linguistics 27(1). 1–24. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2007b. The Associative-Cognitive CREED. In Bill VanPatten & Jessica Williams. (eds.), Theories of second language acquisition: an introduction, 77–95. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ellis, Nick C., Rita Simpson-Vlach, & Carson Maynard. 2008. Formulaic language in native and second language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 42(3). 375–396. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evert, Stefan. 2009. Corpora and collocations. In Anke Lüdeling & Merja. Kytö. (eds.), Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 21, 1212–1248. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan Th. 2008. Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13(4). 403–437. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2010. Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora: further explorations. In Stefan Th. Gries, Stefanie Wulff, & Mark Davies. (eds.), Corpus linguistic applications: current studies, new directions, 197–212. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2019a. Ten lectures on corpus-linguistic approaches: Applications for usage-based and psycholinguistic research. Leiden & Boston: Brill. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
2020. Analyzing dispersion. In Magali Paquot & Stefan Th. Gries. (eds.), A practical handbook of corpus linguistics, 99–118. Berlin & New York: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gries, Stefan, Th. 2021. What do (some of) our association measures measure (most)? Association? Journal of Second Language Studies. Available online: 12 November 2021. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Juilland, Alphonse G., Dorothy R. Brodin, & Catherine Davidovitch. 1970. Frequency dictionary of French words. The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kromer, Victor. 2003. An usage measure based on psychophysical relations. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 10(2). 177–186. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Oakes, Michael P. & Malcolm Farrow. 2007. Use of the Chi-Squared Test to examine vocabulary differences in English language corpora representing seven different countries. Literary and Linguistic Computing 22(1). 85–99. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Pecina, Pavel. 2009. Lexical association measures and collocation extraction. Language Resources and Evaluation 44(1–2). 137–158. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Robertson, Stephen. 2004. Understanding Inverse Document Frequency: on theoretical arguments of IDF. Journal of Documentation 60(5). 503–520. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rosengren, Inger. 1971. The quantitative concept of language and its relation to the structure of frequency dictionaries. Études de linguistique appliquée (Nouvelle Série) 11. 103–127.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Savický, Petr & Jaroslava Hlaváčová. 2002. Measures of word commonness. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 9(3), 215–231. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Schmid, Hans Joerg. 2010. Entrenchment, salience, and basic levels. In Dirk Geeraerts & Hubert Cuyckens. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics, 117–138. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Siyanova-Chanturia, Anna. 2015. Collocation in beginner learner writing: A longitudinal study. System 531. 148–160. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spärck Jones, Karen. 1972. A statistical interpretation of term specificity and its application in information retrieval. Journal of Documentation 28(1). 11–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spieler, Daniel H. & David A. Balota. 1997. Bringing computational models of word naming down to the item level. Psychological Science 8(6). 411–416. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tucker, Benjamin V., Daniel Brennerm, D. Kyle Danielson, Matthew C. Kelley, Filip Nenadić, & Michelle Sims. 2019. The Massive Auditory Lexical Decision (MALD) database. Behavior Research Methods 511. 1187–1204. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zagorsky, Jay L. 2007. Do you have to be smart to be rich? The impact of IQ on wealth, income and financial distress. Intelligence 35(5). 489–501. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (15)

Cited by 15 other publications

Dubois, Tanguy, Magali Paquot & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2025. Future-time reference in spoken EFL. Journal of Second Language Studies 8:1 ► pp. 89 ff. DOI logo
Feltgen, Quentin
2025. Quantitative Approaches to Grammaticalization. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 47-1 DOI logo
Flanagan, Joseph
2025. Reproducibility, replicability, robustness, and generalizability in corpus linguistics. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 30:2 ► pp. 130 ff. DOI logo
Gries, Stefan Th.
2025. Corpus Linguistics: Quantitative Methods. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Gries, Stefan Th.
2025. Cultural Keywords in Varieties Research. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science DOI logo
Th Gries, Stefan
2024.  Corrections to Nelson (2023): DP norm and D KLnorm are Not Wrong on Pi at All . Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 31:1 ► pp. 43 ff. DOI logo
Hilpert, Martin
2025. Frequency. In The Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar, ► pp. 149 ff. DOI logo
Nelson, Robert N.
2025. Groundhog Day is Not a Good Model for Corpus Dispersion. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 32:2 ► pp. 103 ff. DOI logo
Platt, William C. X.
2025. Review of Gries (2024): Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness: Revising and tupleizing corpus-linguistic measures. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 30:3 ► pp. 417 ff. DOI logo
Shadrova, Anna
2025. No three productions alike: Lexical variability, situated dynamics, and path dependence in task-based corpora. Open Linguistics 11:1 DOI logo
Soenning, Lukas
2025. , DOI logo
Sönning, Lukas
2025. Advancing our understanding of dispersion measures in corpus research. Corpora 20:1 ► pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Wulff, Stefanie & Stefan Th. Gries
2024.  CLLT ‘versus’ Corpora and IJCL: a (half serious) keyness analysis. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 20:3 ► pp. 461 ff. DOI logo
Jeaco, Stephen
2023. How can we communicate (visually) what we (usually) mean by collocation and keyness?. Journal of Second Language Studies 6:1 ► pp. 29 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2024. Frequency, Dispersion, Association, and Keyness [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 115], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 13 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue