Effects of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness on spoken word recognition.
The relative abilities of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness to predict accuracy of spoken word recognition in noise were compared using two data sets. Word frequency is the number of times a word appears in a corpus of text. Contextual diversity is the number of different documents in which the word appears in that corpus. Semantic distinctiveness takes into account the number of different semantic contexts in which the word appears. Semantic distinctiveness and contextual diversity were both able to explain variance above and beyond that explained by word frequency, which by itself explained little unique variance.
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 East 10th Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA. johns4@indiana.edu
Brendan T
BT
Johns
Thomas M
TM
Gruenenfelder
David B
DB
Pisoni
Michael N
MN
Jones
D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D001302:Audiometry, Speech; D006801:Humans; D015999:Multivariate Analysis; D009622:Noise / Q000009:adverse effects*; D010470:Perceptual Masking; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012660:Semantics; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception