I guess I'll see you all tomorrow, but I thought I might post anyway. Maybe it'll help me get things straight in my mind.
I turned in my IRB and got it back with a comment that I should add a sentence to my consent form. Did that, sent it back, but haven't heard from them since.
While waiting for the IRB, I've been revising my stimuli. I looked at different corpora to see if I could use a different one than the one I used for my proposal, and it basically came down to: the British National Corpus (BNC), the American National Corpus (ANC), and the one I used before, the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).
I was hoping to use the BNC because of its large size (100 million words) and because most corpus studies use it, but I found that it isn't free, ($100+), it takes time to get it, and there are some differences in American and British English. The ANC is too small in size (22 million, and 15 million freely available) and potentially skewed. So that leaves me with COCA, which I used for my proposal. I get free access to most of the functions, but I just found out that I need to purchase what I need most (which is a word frequency list)! $500....yeah.
So right now, I'm doing this and that with COCA to see if I can get around using a word frequency list. If I find I can't, I think I'll eventually buy a license to the BNC.
Whew! Anway, that's where I am right now. Hopefully, I'll be able to move forward and get past this stage. Good luck to all of you too!
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This might not be a help, but for word frequency, this is the one that I use.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.psy.uwa.edu.au/mrcdatabase/uwa_mrc.htm
Rebecca recommended this site.
Thanks Nobi! I'll check out the website.
ReplyDeleteAs for my problem regarding the corpus: I found a way to work around it, and it also turns out that I can use the BNC if I want, at the main library on a certain computer. But I think I'm going to stick with the stimuli and corpus I have right now and focus on revising them.
Thanks again and good luck!
I also have a software program on my office computer that provides information on the words found in Webster's Pocket Dictionary. The information includes frequency as well as lexical neighborhood density.
ReplyDelete