title: The influence of contextual diversity on word learning.
abstract: In a series of analyses over mega datasets, Jones, Johns, and Recchia (Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 66(2), 115-124, 2012) and Johns et al. (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132:2, EL74-EL80, 2012) found that a measure of contextual diversity that takes into account the semantic variability of a word's contexts provided a better fit to both visual and spoken word recognition data than traditional measures, such as word frequency or raw context counts. This measure was empirically validated with an artificial language experiment (Jones et al.). The present study extends the empirical results with a unique natural language learning paradigm, which allows for an examination of the semantic representations that are acquired as semantic diversity is varied. Subjects were incidentally exposed to novel words as they rated short selections from articles, books, and newspapers. When novel words were encountered across distinct discourse contexts, subjects were both faster and more accurate at recognizing them than when they were seen in redundant contexts. However, learning across redundant contexts promoted the development of more stable semantic representations. These findings are predicted by a distributional learning model trained on the same materials as our subjects.
authors.affiliation: Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, 122 Carey Hall, Buffalo, NY, 14214, USA. btjohns@buffalo.edu.
authors.forename: Brendan T
authors.initials: BT
authors.lastname: Johns
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Melody
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dye
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA.
authors.forename: Michael N
authors.initials: MN
authors.lastname: Jones
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D032882:Comprehension; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Computational modeling; Language comprehension; Semantic memory; Word recognition