Salience Counts—And So Does Accuracy: Correcting and Updating a Measure for Free‐List‐Item Salience

Through a series of almost comical errors (for which the senior author takes full responsibility), a recent JLA article on English color terms inaccurately described a measure of free-list-item salience (Smith et al. 1995:206). Fortunately, the analysis suffered little material harm; but in order for the measure to have general value for studies utilizing free-listing data collection, colleagues need a more accurate description of its calculation than appears in the 1995 article. For a set of free-list data, the index is designed to take into account both the frequency and rank order of items in the lists. Its correct formulation is