This study was designed to address whether learners would more accurately judge the relative frequency of words that are similar in meaning and identical in parts of speech than words that differ in both respects, and whether such judgments would vary according to corpus-based frequency levels of target words and learners’ vocabulary size as measured by a revised version of Nation and Belgar’s (2007) vocabulary levels test. A sample of 38 Korean students learning English at a Korean university were asked to complete the vocabulary levels test and a vocabulary frequency judgment task. Results show that subjects were able to make very accurate judgments of vocabulary frequency. More importantly, t-tests revealed that subjects performed significantly better on similar and high-frequency words than on dissimilar and low-frequency ones. Finally, correlational analyses suggested that subjects’ vocabulary size was not closely related to intuitive vocabulary frequency judgments. Limitations and implications of the study are discussed, and directions for future research are suggested.
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