[EN]Frequency of occurrence is an important attribute
of lexical units, and one that is widely used in psycholog ical research and theorization. Although printed frequency
norms have long been available for Spanish, and subtitle based norms have more recently been published, oral
frequency norms have not been systematically compiled
for a representative set of words. In this study, a corpus of
over three million units, representing present-day use of the
language in Spain, was used to derive a frequency count of
spoken words. The corpus consisted of 913 separate
documents that contained transcriptions of oral recordings
obtained in a wide variety of situations, mostly radio and
television programs. The resulting database, containing
absolute and relative frequency values for 67,979 orally
produced words, is presented. Validity analyses showed
significant correlations of oral frequency with other
frequency measures and suggest that oral frequency can
predict some types of lexical processing with the same or
higher levels of precision, when contrasted with text- or
subtitle-based frequencies. In conclusion, we discuss ways
in which these oral frequency norms can be put to use.
