Dispersions and adjusted frequencies in corpora: further explorations

In order to adjust observed frequencies of occurrence, previous studies have suggested a variety of measures of dispersion and adjusted frequencies. In a previous study, I reviewed many of these measures and suggested an alternative measure, DP (for ‘deviation of proportions’), which I argued to be conceptually simpler and more versatile than many competing measures. However, despite the relevance of dispersion for virtually all corpuslinguistic work, it is still a very much under-researched topic: to the best of my knowledge, there is not a single study investigating how different measures compare to each other when applied to large datasets, nor is there any work that attempts to determine how different measures match up with the kind of psycholinguistic data that dispersions and adjusted frequencies are supposed to represent. This article takes exploratory steps in both of these directions.