Semantic diversity, frequency and the development of lexical quality in children's word reading

Yaling Hsiao; Kate Nation

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2018.08.005

Semantic diversity, frequency and the development of lexical quality in children's word reading

Yaling Hsiao, Kate Nation

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

39 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Frequency exerts a powerful influence on lexical processing but it is possible that at least part of its effect is caused by high frequency words being experienced in more diverse contexts over an individual's language experience. To capture this variability, we applied Latent Semantic Analysis on a 35-million-word corpus of texts written for children, deriving a measure of semantic diversity that quantifies the similarity of all the contexts a word appears in. Across three experiments with 6–13-year-old children involving reading aloud and lexical decision, we found a main effect of semantic diversity: high diversity words were responded to faster and read more accurately than low diversity words. Frequency, document count and age of acquisition were also significant predictors of reading behaviour. These findings demonstrate that contextual variability contributes to word learning and the development of lexical quality, beyond the effect of frequency.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	114-126
Number of pages	13
Journal	Journal of Memory and Language
Volume	103
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.08.005
Publication status	Published - Dec 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We would like to thank Oxford University Press for allowing us access to the Oxford Children’s Corpus, with particular thanks to Vineeta Gupta and Nilanjana Banerji for their support and collaboration. We are most grateful to Jessie Ricketts, Morag Stuart and Jackie Masterson who kindly shared data from the standardization sample of the Diagnostic Test of Word Reading Processes (Forum for Research in Literacy & Language, 2012) for the secondary data analyses reported in Experiment 3. Phoebe Rogers, Helen Norris and Megan Bird provided outstanding research assistance; we also thank Bram Vanderkerckhove for his work on the corpus in the early stages of the project, Paul Hoffman for his advice on calculating semantic diversity and Victoria Murphy and Stephen Pulman for constructive discussion. This research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (reference: RPG-2015-070 ).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Inc.

Keywords

Contextual diversity
Frequency effect
Lexical quality
Reading development
Semantic diversity

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology
Language and Linguistics
Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Linguistics and Language
Artificial Intelligence

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10.1016/j.jml.2018.08.005

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abstract = "Frequency exerts a powerful influence on lexical processing but it is possible that at least part of its effect is caused by high frequency words being experienced in more diverse contexts over an individual's language experience. To capture this variability, we applied Latent Semantic Analysis on a 35-million-word corpus of texts written for children, deriving a measure of semantic diversity that quantifies the similarity of all the contexts a word appears in. Across three experiments with 6–13-year-old children involving reading aloud and lexical decision, we found a main effect of semantic diversity: high diversity words were responded to faster and read more accurately than low diversity words. Frequency, document count and age of acquisition were also significant predictors of reading behaviour. These findings demonstrate that contextual variability contributes to word learning and the development of lexical quality, beyond the effect of frequency.",

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author = "Yaling Hsiao and Kate Nation",

note = "Funding Information: We would like to thank Oxford University Press for allowing us access to the Oxford Children{\textquoteright}s Corpus, with particular thanks to Vineeta Gupta and Nilanjana Banerji for their support and collaboration. We are most grateful to Jessie Ricketts, Morag Stuart and Jackie Masterson who kindly shared data from the standardization sample of the Diagnostic Test of Word Reading Processes (Forum for Research in Literacy & Language, 2012) for the secondary data analyses reported in Experiment 3. Phoebe Rogers, Helen Norris and Megan Bird provided outstanding research assistance; we also thank Bram Vanderkerckhove for his work on the corpus in the early stages of the project, Paul Hoffman for his advice on calculating semantic diversity and Victoria Murphy and Stephen Pulman for constructive discussion. This research was funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (reference: RPG-2015-070 ). Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 Elsevier Inc.",

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Semantic diversity, frequency and the development of lexical quality in children's word reading

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

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