more error prone less than lower frequency items. In free recall, higher-frequency words are less error prone than lower-frequency items. Cognitive influences The word frequency effect changes how the brain encodes the information. Readers began spelling the higher frequency words faster than the lower frequency words when spelling the words from dictation. The length of saccade varies depending on the frequency of words and the validity of the previous (preview) word in predicting the target word. For higher frequency target words, the saccades as the reader approaches the word is longer when there is a valid preview word in front of it than for lower frequency words. When the preview word is invalid, there is no difference in saccades between high or low frequency words. Fixations follow an opposite pattern with longer fixations on low frequency words. Research has also found that high frequency words are skipped more when read than low frequency words. Gaze duration is also shorter when reading high frequency words than low frequency words. Module connections are strengthened as words increase in frequency assisting to explain differences in brain processing. Real world applications Written words Leading character effect (LCF) In many languages, certain characters are used more frequently than others. Examples of more frequent characters in English are the vowels, m, r, s, t...etc. In other languages such as Chinese, characters are morphemes that are individual words. More than 100,000 words in Chinese are made of the same 5,000 characters. As people process the first character of the word, they make a mental prediction of what the word is before reading the rest of the characters. If the character and other preprocessing information indicates that the word is short and familiar, the reader is more likely to skip the entire word. The character frequency may be more important when reading than the frequency of the word as a whole. In a study examining the Chinese language, reaction times for target words with a first character that was high frequency was shorter than those with first characters that were low frequency when simply naming the Chinese word. When making a lexical decision, target words with higher LCF took longer to respond to than low LCF. An example of a high frequency character in Chinese is the character for family (家) which appears before many other characters. These effects were moderated by the predictability of the next words