Poster B87, Tuesday, August 20, 2019, 3:15 – 5:00 pm, Restaurant Hall
The nature of the contextual diversity effect: Evidence from an incidental vocabulary learning task
Eva Rosa1,2, José Luis Tapia1, Francisco Rocabado3, Marta Vergara-Martínez2, Manuel Perea2;1Universidad Católica de Valencia San Vicente Mártir, 2ERI-Lectura, Universitat de València, 3Universidad Nebrija
One of the more robust and replicated effects in psycholinguistics is the word-frequency effect: High-frequency words are more easily accessible than low-frequency words—this has been obtained using a variety of methods, from behavioural to electrophysiological. However, recent research has shown that contextual diversity (the proportion of contexts in which a word occurs) is a better predictor than word-frequency in word recognition tasks (e.g., Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, 2006; Perea, Soares, & Comesaña, 2013) and during sentence reading (e.g., Plummer, Perea, & Rayner, 2014; see also Chen, Huang, Bai, Xu, Yang, & Tanenhaus, 2017). While contextual diversity and word-frequency are highly correlated (i.e., high-frequency words tend to be words that occur in many contexts), their actual influence on word processing points towards different mechanisms. Vergara-Martínez, Comesaña, and Perea (2017) replicated the N400 word-frequency effect (high-frequency < low-frequency) in an ERP lexical decision experiment. Critically, the N400 contextual diversity effect was in opposite direction (high contextual diversity > low contextual diversity). Vergara-Martínez et al. (2017) concluded that higher contextual diversity leads to semantically richer representations. Importantly, contextual diversity also plays a role when learning new words. Rosa, Tapia, and Perea (2017) manipulated the number of semantically distinctive contexts in which a new word appeared during the incidental acquisition of vocabulary (many contexts [fables, math texts, and science texts] vs. one context [fables, math texts, or science texts). Results showed a facilitative effect of contextual diversity in four tasks: free recall, recognition, multiple-choice test, and pictogram matching. This finding suggests that the strength of the memory trace of a newly learned word increases when there is a change between the different contexts in which it is experienced (Semantic Distinctiveness model: Jones, Johns, & Recchia, 2012) (see Zhang, Ding, Li, & Yang, 2018, for electrophysiological correlates of contextual diversity with word learning in the same direction as in the Vergara-Martínez et al., 2017, experiment). Here were focused on the nature of the contextual diversity effect by manipulating a purely perceptual element: whether the newly learned words benefit from being spoken by different voices. Grade 3 children had to incidentally learn 12 very low frequency words, while listening to three short fables (155 words). Each fable contained 4 experimental words. In the low diversity condition, the fables were read by the same voice. In the high diversity condition, each fable was read by different voices. The number of times the children listened to each word was kept constant across both conditions. The experiment consisted of three training days (3 texts per day) and a final assessment. Results showed a facilitative contextual diversity effect in two tasks that evaluated memory, orthographic and semantic integration: a multiple-choice test and a pictogram matching task. These findings suggest that the SD model needs to be expanded by considering not only the semantic characteristics of each context, but also their perceptual cues (e.g., voice).
Themes: Reading, Development
Method: Behavioral