Abstract
Semantic diversity–a metric that captures variations in previous contextual experience with a word–influences children’s lexical decision and reading aloud. We investigated the effects of semantic diversity and frequency on children’s reading of words embedded in sentences, while eye movements were recorded. If semantic diversity and frequency reflect different aspects of experience that influence reading in different ways, they should show independent effects and perhaps even different processing signatures during reading. Forty-nine 9-year-olds read sentences containing high/low frequency and high/low diversity words, manipulated orthogonally. We observed main effects of both variables, with high frequency and high semantic diversity words being read more easily. These results show that variations in the amount and nature of contextual experience influence how easily words are processed during reading.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 356-364 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| Journal | Scientific Studies of Reading |
| Volume | 24 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 3 Jul 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This work was supported by grants from The Economic and Social Research Council (ES/M009998/1) and The Leverhulme Trust (RPG-2015-070).We are grateful to the Children’s Dictionaries Department at Oxford University Press for their collaboration and support. We also thank three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Education
- Psychology (miscellaneous)
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