The ERP signature of the contextual diversity effect in visual word recognition

Vergara-Martínez, Marta; Comesaña, Montserrat; Perea, Manuel

doi:10.3758/s13415-016-0491-7

Cited by 31 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 79 publications

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“…A different theoretical contribution of this work is the finding of the contextual dependency of personal names. The influence of context on lexical organization and word learning is a burgeoning research area (e.g., Adelman et al, 2006;Hsiao & Nation, 2018;Johns, Dye, & Jones, 2016a;Johns, Gruenenfelder, Pisoni, & Jones, 2012a;Johns, Sheppard, Jones, & Taler, 2016b;Jones et al, 2012;Joseph & Nation, 2018;Rosa, Tapia, & Perea, 2017;Vergara-Martínez, Comesaña, & Perea, 2017). To empirically validate contextual approaches to lexical organization, it has been necessary to devise artificial language experiments (e.g., Jones et al, 2012) or highly controlled natural-language experiments (e.g., Johns, Dye, & Jones, 2016a), due to the highly correlated nature of word frequency and context counts.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender bias at scale: Evidence from the usage of personal names

Johns

Dye

2019

Behav Res

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Recent research within the computational social sciences has shown that when computational models of lexical semantics are trained on standard natural-language corpora, they embody many of the implicit biases that are seen in human behavior (Caliskan, Bryson, & Narayanan, 2017). In the present study, we aimed to build on this work and demonstrate that there is a large and systematic bias in the use of personal names in the natural-language environment, such that male names are much more prevalent than female names. This bias holds over an analysis of billions of words of text, subcategorized into different genres within fiction novels, nonfiction books, and subtitles from television and film. Additionally, we showed that this bias holds across time, with more recent work displaying the same patterns as work published tens or hundreds of years previously. Finally, we showed that the main cause of the bias comes from male authors perpetuating the bias toward male names, with female authors showing a much smaller bias. This work demonstrates the potential of big-data analyses to shed light on large-scale trends in human behavior and to elucidate their causes.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender bias at scale: Evidence from the usage of personal names

Johns

Dye

2019

Behav Res

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“…First, an ex-ploration of the structural differences between common and rare words [56]. Second, an application of our methodology to other magnitudes such as contextual diversity, which may be more relevant than the mere word frequency in some lexical tasks [57,58]. In all these plots, frequency is placed on the x-axis for at least three reasons.…”

Section: Discussion and Future Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language

Fernández

Hernández-Fernández

Català

et al. 2019

Computer Speech & Language

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The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages.

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“…www.nature.com/scientificreports/ language-related tasks, such as word learning 8 , lexical access 18 , and serial recall performance 17 , recent studies have questioned this effect. These studies suggest that contextual diversity might be the factor responsible for some of the effects initially attributed to word frequency 12,18,19 , as in some cases it explains more variance than word frequency, rendering the later a non-significant predictor. Although word frequency and contextual diversity are highly correlated, they show different ERP signatures 19 , suggesting different underlying brain processes, and in some cases, they show opposite behavioral effects.…”

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confidence: 99%

The effects of contextual diversity on incidental vocabulary learning in the native and a foreign language

Frances

Martin

Duñabeitia

2020

Sci Rep

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Vocabulary learning occurs throughout the lifespan, often implicitly. For foreign language learners, this is particularly challenging as they must acquire a large number of new words with little exposure. In the present study, we explore the effects of contextual diversity-namely, the number of texts a word appears in-on native and foreign language word learning. Participants read several texts that had novel pseudowords replacing high-frequency words. The total number of encounters with the novel words was held constant, but they appeared in 1, 2, 4, or 8 texts. In addition, some participants read the texts in Spanish (their native language) and others in English (their foreign language). We found that increasing contextual diversity improved recall and recognition of the word, as well as the ability to match the word with its meaning while keeping comprehension unimpaired. Using a foreign language only affected performance in the matching task, where participants had to quickly identify the meaning of the word. Results are discussed in the greater context of the word learning and foreign language literature as well as their importance as a teaching tool. Vocabulary learning is an essential aspect of language that continues throughout the lifespan. To a large extent, the vocabulary we incorporate comes from incidental learning during reading 1,2 rather than explicit effort. This becomes particularly relevant when learning a new language, where a large amount of vocabulary must be acquired very quickly and partially without supervision. Following this reasoning, several studies have shown that it is possible to learn vocabulary implicitly through reading in our foreign language 3-7. In addition, we know that people incorporate new lexical forms with as little as one exposure in their native language and as little as two exposures in their foreign language 4 , but that learning improves with exposure to multiple instances of the word 8. Implicit word learning in context differs somewhat between one's native and foreign languages. In particular, reading times for new words in our native language decrease significantly after the first exposure-suggesting some level of incorporation of the lexical item-whereas for the foreign language this happens only after two to four exposures 4. This might relate to the fact that it is more difficult to extract the meaning of words from context in a foreign language. This is in part because these skills seem to be affected by knowledge of the language and experience in that particular task 9,10. Although the number of times people encounter a word affects how well they learn and remember it 5,8 , there is not much literature on how spreading these encounters across passages affects learning. One of the ways in which this spread is quantified is through contextual diversity-namely, the number of texts in which a word appears in a database 11,12. This variable can be used to describe the influence of context beyond the mere number of occurrences or the frequency with which we encou...

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The ERP signature of the contextual diversity effect in visual word recognition

Cited by 31 publications

References 79 publications

Gender bias at scale: Evidence from the usage of personal names

Gender bias at scale: Evidence from the usage of personal names

Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language

The effects of contextual diversity on incidental vocabulary learning in the native and a foreign language

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