Prenominal adjective order is such a fat big deal because adjectives are ordered by likely need

Westbury, Chris

doi:10.3758/s13423-020-01769-w

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 42 publications

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“…Adelman et al (2006) proposed that the theoretical basis for the importance of CD in lexical organization comes from the principle of likely need , adapted from the rational analysis of memory (Anderson, 1974; Anderson & Milson, 1989; Anderson & Schooler, 1991; see Jones et al, 2017 for an in depth discussion of these issues in terms of lexical organization and Westbury, 2020, for an additional discussion of its use in language processing). The rational analysis of memory is based on the notion that human memory is an adaptive memory system, tasked with solving a significant data access problem, given the scope of the amount of information contained in human memory.…”

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confidence: 99%

Disentangling contextual diversity: Communicative need as a lexical organizer.

Johns

2021

Psychological Review

133

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Contextual diversity (CD; Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, 2006) modifies word frequency by ignoring word repetition in context. It has been repeatedly found that a CD count provides a better fit to lexical organization data than does word frequency (e.g., Adelman & Brown, 2008;Brysbaert & New, 2009). The importance of CD has been interpreted with the principle of likely need, adapted from the rational analysis of memory (Anderson & Schooler, 1991), which states that words that have been used in many past contexts are more likely to be needed in a future context. Central to the cognitive mechanisms of computing likely need is a definition of linguistic context itself. Typically, linguistic context is defined by relatively small units of language, such as a document within a corpus. However, recent research has demonstrated that larger definitions of context, some spanning tens or hundreds of thousands of words, provide a better accounting of lexical organization data (Johns, Dye, & Jones, 2020). This article attempts to redefine the notion of linguistic context by using socially based contextual measures, derived from the online communication patterns of hundreds of thousands of individuals from the discussion forum Reddit, consisting of over 55 billion words. Multiple count-based and semantic diversity models of contextual diversity were derived from this data. The results demonstrate that the communication patterns of individuals across discourses provides the best accounting of lexical organization data, indicating that classic notions of using local linguistic context to update a word's strength in the lexicon need to be reevaluated.

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confidence: 99%

Disentangling contextual diversity: Communicative need as a lexical organizer.

Johns

2021

Psychological Review

133

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“…The main theoretical debate in the construction of contextual diversity measures is the role of repetition and likely need in determining lexical organization (see Jones et al, 2017 for an in-depth discussion of these issues and Westbury, 2021 for a related discussion in a different area of psycholinguistics). The findings of the present work are in line with Johns (2021b), as they support a lexical organization mechanism based upon lexical need calculations.…”

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confidence: 99%

Determining the importance of frequency and contextual diversity in the lexical organization of multiword expressions.

Senaldi¹,

Titone²,

Johns³

2022

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology / Revue canadienne

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Corpus-based models of lexical strength have called into question the role of word frequency as an organizing principle of the lexicon, revealing that contextual and semantic diversity measures provide a closer fit to lexical behavior data (Adelman et al., 2006;Jones et al., 2012). Contextual diversity measures modify word frequency by ignoring word repetition in context, while semantic diversity measures consider the semantic consistency of contextual word occurrence. Recent research has shown that a better account of lexical organization data is provided by socially based measures of semantic diversity, which encode the communication patterns of individuals across discourses (Johns, 2021b). While most research on contextual diversity has focused on single words, recent corpus-based and experimental evidence suggests that an integral part of language use involves recurrent and more structurally complex units, such as multiword phrases and idioms. The aim of the present work was to determine if contextual and semantic diversity drive lexical organization at the level of multiword units (here, operationalized as idiomatic expressions), in addition to single words. To this end, we analyzed normative ratings of familiarity for 210 English idioms (Libben & Titone, 2008) using a set of contextual, semantic, and socially based diversity measures that were computed from a 55-billion word corpus of Reddit comments. The results confirm the superiority of diversity measures over frequency for multiword expressions, suggesting that multiword units, such as idiomatic phrases, show similar lexical organization dynamics as single words. Public Significance StatementCorpus-based evidence indicates that the ease with which we access single words in the lexicon depends on their contextual and social diversity, rather than their frequency. However, an integral part of our language environment consists also of conventional multiword units like idioms. We demonstrate that contextual and social diversity shape the lexicon also at the level of multiword units and that idioms thus exhibit the same lexical organizational dynamics as single words.

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Content matters: Measures of contextual diversity must consider semantic content

Johns

Jones

2022

Journal of Memory and Language

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Measures of contextual diversity seek to replace word frequency by counting the number of different contexts that a word occurs in rather than the total raw number of occurrences (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, 2006). It has repeatedly been shown that contextual diversity measures outperform word frequency on word recognition datasets (Adelman & Brown, 2008;Brysbaert & New, 2009). Recently, Hollis (2020) demonstrated that the standard operationalization of contextual diversity as a document count accounts for relatively little unique variance over word frequency when other variables of contextual occurrences are controlled for. One aspect of the analysis conducted by Hollis (2020) that was not taken into account was the semantic content of the contexts that words occur in. Johns, Dye, and Jones (2020) and Johns (2021) have recently shown that defining linguistic contexts at larger, and more ecologically valid, levels lead to contextual diversity measures that provide very large improvements over word frequency, especially when implemented with principles from the Semantic Distinctiveness Model of Jones, Johns, and Recchia (2012). Across a series of simulations, we demonstrate that the advantages of contextual diversity measures are dependent upon the usage of semantic representations of words to determine the uniqueness of contextual occurrences, where unique contextual occurrences provide a greater impact to a word's lexical strength than redundant contextual occurrences. The results of the simulations suggest that for better theoretical accounts of lexical strength to be developed, attention needs to be paid to the representation of linguistic contexts. Code and data associated with this article is available at https://osf.io/r5ec2/.

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Prenominal adjective order is such a fat big deal because adjectives are ordered by likely need

Cited by 5 publications

References 42 publications

Disentangling contextual diversity: Communicative need as a lexical organizer.

Disentangling contextual diversity: Communicative need as a lexical organizer.

Determining the importance of frequency and contextual diversity in the lexical organization of multiword expressions.

Content matters: Measures of contextual diversity must consider semantic content

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