Case-sensitive letter and bigram frequency counts from large-scale English corpora.

Abstract

We tabulated upper- and lowercase letter frequency using several large-scale English corpora (approximately 183 million words in total). The results indicate that the relative frequencies for upper- and lowercase letters are not equivalent. We report a letter-naming experiment in which uppercase frequency predicted response time to uppercase letters better than did lowercase frequency. Tables of case-sensitive letter and bigram frequency are provided, including common nonalphabetic characters. Because subjects are sensitive to frequency relationships among letters, we recommend that experimenters use case-sensitive counts when constructing stimuli from letters.