Word Frequency Effect

The word frequency effect is a psychological phenomenon in which people recognize commonly used words faster and more accurately than words used rarely. Recognition times are consistently faster for words a person has seen more often than for words seen less often, so a high-frequency word such as the is processed more quickly than a low-frequency word such as strait, an effect that varies with an individual's own familiarity with a given language and has also been found to extend to character-level processing in languages such as Chinese.