Reply to Garcia et al.: Common mistakes in measuring frequency dependent word characteristics
This addresses methodological critiques in linguistics research, but it is incremental as it defends prior work rather than introducing new findings.
The authors refute concerns by Garcia et al., showing that their study's English component aligns statistically with related surveys and that measurement errors do not explain reported positivity biases, with no survey design influence apparent.
We demonstrate that the concerns expressed by Garcia et al. are misplaced, due to (1) a misreading of our findings in [1]; (2) a widespread failure to examine and present words in support of asserted summary quantities based on word usage frequencies; and (3) a range of misconceptions about word usage frequency, word rank, and expert-constructed word lists. In particular, we show that the English component of our study compares well statistically with two related surveys, that no survey design influence is apparent, and that estimates of measurement error do not explain the positivity biases reported in our work and that of others. We further demonstrate that for the frequency dependence of positivity---of which we explored the nuances in great detail in [1]---Garcia et al. did not perform a reanalysis of our data---they instead carried out an analysis of a different, statistically improper data set and introduced a nonlinearity before performing linear regression.