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Abstract

Contextual diversity refers to the number of contexts in which a word appears. It is traditionally believed that word frequency is an important factor affecting lexical access, but the presence of contextual diversity challenges the position of word frequency in lexical cognition. The research on contextual diversity and word frequency is mainly focused on two fields, namely word recognition and word learning. However, research outcomes concerning the mapping between contextual diversity and word frequency are inconsistent with each other: 1) Contextual diversity can replace word frequency, and is better than word frequency in terms of word recognition; 2) Word frequency and contextual diversity are two different variables that affect word recognition, both of which independently affect word recognition. No definite conclusion about the relationship between the two has been reached yet. Finally, we highlight topics that are in need of future systematic research.

Key words

contextual diversity, word frequency, word recognition, word learning

Introduction

The effect of word frequency on lexical processes is both ubiquitous and large. High-frequency words are known to more people and are processed faster than low-frequency words [1-4]. Also, many evidence from behavior、electrophysiological and neural image data all proved the existence of word frequency [5-8]. Besides the evidence from corpus of Indo-European languages, word frequency is also found in the corpus of Sino-Tibetan languages [9]. This is the case both in adult readers [10,11] and in young readers [12,13].

Word frequency typically explains some 30-40% of the variance in almost visual word and reading models. For example, in the family of localist activation-based models, the resting level of activation of a given word unit depends on its printed word frequency [7,14-16]. Likewise, computational models of reading such as the E-Z Reader model [17] and the SWIFT model [18] employ a similar mechanism of word frequency during the initial ‘‘lexical access’’ stage.

However, with the deepening of the study of word frequency effect, more and more scholars have doubts about the way of action of word frequency: frequency is core to classic strength accounts of lexical access based on the assumption that each repetition increases memory strength for a word, boosting the efficiency of later access. However recent research on pure repetition (repetitive effects do not depend on other factors) showed that repetitive effects were always mixed with other factors, like time [19] and contexts [20] and thus influenced word recognition. It means that word frequency may affect lexical process with other factors and thus challenged the role of word frequency in word recognition. In sum, research has proved that word frequency plays an important role in word recognition, while with the deepening of research, the way of word frequency effect is still unclear, so contextual diversity came into interpreting lexical processing.

Adelman, Brown and Quesada operationalized a measure called contextual diversity (CD) [21], it refers the number of contexts in a corpus in which a word is experienced. Brysbaert and New B [22] then gave an operational definition, it refers to the number of movies or dramas that a word appears in a subtitle corpus, and further research almost use subtitles as source of corpus, and it has been proved to explain significantly more of the variance in word naming and lexical decision performance than the measures based on written texts [23-26].

The concept of contextual diversity is proposed by many researchers, while it also raised controversy. Johns, Gruenenfelder, Pisoni and Jones [27] questioned that the definition of contextual diversity ignores the information redundancy of words in contexts. Besides, it is questionable whether common operational definitions of CD are valid measures under the principle of likely need. Furthermore, context has been described in different ways [28]. For example, context has been described as information that fluctuates randomly over time with respect to different item presentations [29-31] which might be referred to as temporal context [32]. Context has also been defined as the physical environment in which an item occurs [33-35]. Howard and Kahana (2002) described the context associated with a given item as a composite representation of the semantic features of the items that preceded it on a list [36]. It is not directly obvious how counting documents corresponds to classic notions of a change in context, but it seems intuitive that if a document is repeated in the corpus, we should not consider the two repetitions to be different semantic contexts of the word.

Based on the discussion above, the relationship of word frequency and contextual diversity in visual word recognition is still unclear, and no strong evidence showed the way they influenced lexical processing. We begin our review by discussing the recent research on word frequency and contextual diversity in visual word recognition, including methods and relevant research. We conclude with issues that call for future systematic research.

Methods

Contextual diversity and word frequency in word recognition

Most researchers carried out their research by lexical decision task [1,37] and word naming task to explore the role of word frequency and contextual diversity in visual word recognition. Lexical decision task is the most common laboratory task for studying word recognition. Participants are required to decide whether a string of letters is a word or not (a nonword) [38-40].

Word naming task is another common laboratory task. This method requires participants to read out a letter or a word, or name a word, and record the naming latency. Word naming can measure the time required to identify a word, as well as various factors that affect word recognition. The frequency of the word, the degree of complexity, whether the background context and other factors have a great impact on the naming time. Compared to vocabulary lexical decision tasks, word naming usually occurs at the later stage of lexical access. In addition, it is worth noting that it may appear the separation of speech and semantic phenomenon when people name a word, such as patients with traumatic brain injury can name and distinguish between words and non-words, but can not understand the meaning of words, thus word naming tasks cannot guarantee lexical access. Therefore, the use of naming tasks is less than the vocabulary judgment task in visual word recognition.

Relevant research on word frequency and contextual diversity

Adelman [1] first investigate the role of word frequency and contextual diversity by lexical decision and word naming tasks. He found, when contextual diversity is control, word frequency effect disappears; when controlling the frequency of words, the contextual diversity effect still exists, so he believes that the context of diversity is a better predictor than word frequency in word recognition. The developmental research by Perea et al. [41] also supported Adelman's view: he selected 22 fourth-year children in Portuguese, and likewise used lexical decision task to get the similar result and thus extending the contextual effects to Fourth grade children. In the sentence reading, there are similar findings, for example, Plummer, Perea and Rayner [41] used eye movement to find that, all low CD words reflect the early processing of eye movement indicators such as the first fixation time, single gaze time after controlling the word frequency, and the eye movement indicators, such as the retrospective path time and the total gaze time, were significantly higher than those of the high frequency words. After controlling the diversity of the situation, the high and low frequency words had no significant difference in all eye movements. Chen et al. [42] found the same results after they get refinement on Plummer’s research. The studies above show that contextual diversity is a better predictor than word frequency in word recognition.

However, Vergara-Martínez et al., [26] found, when using ERPs to detect the role of contextual diversity, it is not an incidental phenomenon of word frequency, and both cannot be substituted for visual word recognition in reading. This contradictory result suggests that the mechanism of contextual diversity is still unclear, and existing research cannot provide clear and strong scientific evidence. First, the Vergara-Martínez et al. [26] did not control the lexical semantic diversity, making the driving mechanism of the contextual diversity effect unclear; secondly, although the EEG technique had a very high temporal sensitivity, Vergara-Martínez et al. did not control the materials (words high-CD high WF and words with low CD high WF word are marginal significant in the frequency of words, p = 0.07, Figure. 1), so that it cannot be concluded that the observed effects of contextual diversity have no interference from word frequency. Given the contradictory results: (1) Contextual diversity rather than word frequency is a better predictor of word recognition [1, 41-43]. (2) both of them could influence word recognition independently, and they are two total different variables [26, 44], thus need more research and discussion to confirm the relationship of the two.

Figure. 1. Mean values for sublexical, lexical, and semantic characteristics of the stimuli [26]

Conclusions and future directions

As described above, research on the relationship between contextual diversity and word frequency is mainly focused on word recognition, but the contradictory results of the effects of the two on the word recognition process showed that the relationship between the two is still not very clear. Basically speaking, Word frequency is highly correlated with context frequency (R= 0.98)

Relationship between word frequency and context frequency (both shown on logarithmic scale). Gray points show relationship for all words in the Touchstone Applied Science Associates Corpus (Figure. 2)[45].

Figure. 2. Relationship between word frequency and context frequency (both shown on logarithmic scale). Gray points show relationship for all words in the Touchstone Applied Science Associates Corpus [45].

However, there are no enough words with low WF and high CD, thus make existing research can only discard this condition. The incompleteness of experimental material may lead to the incompleteness of the comparison result. Therefore, one of the important means to explore the relationship between the word frequency and contextual diversity is to make the two match in different levels. Besides, White et al. [46] found that word frequency only showed linear effect in skipping a word and on first fixation duration, while no linear effect in other measures. Furthermore, the effect of contextual diversity has never before been induced experimentally; to do so would require control over the statistical structure of the language being learned. Finally, the existing research on word frequency and contextual diversity mainly divides the two into high and low levels, rather than categorical or a continuous predictor, so how the two variables affect word recognition still need further support. Therefore, we points to several areas in which more research is needed.

First, we may understand the role of word frequency and contextual diversity in word recognition from other domains. The existing research on word learning may provide a new vision. Contextual diversity has been claimed to be a relevant factor to word acquisition in developing readers [47]. Hills et al, [47] examined the co-occurrence of words in caregiver speech from the CHILDES database and found a word’s contextual diversity predicted the order of early word learning and was highly correlated with the number of unique associative cues for a given target word in adult free association norms. Johns et al. [48] using natural language learning paradigm found that when novel words were encountered across distinct discourse contexts, subjects were both faster and more accurate at recognizing them than when they were seen in redundant contexts. However, learning across redundant contexts promoted the development of more stable semantic representations.

Furthermore, memory studies related to contextual diversity can also provide another new perspective. Parmentier, Comesaña and Soares [49] found a total different result with Adelman’s research in serial recall performance, that is, the effect of word frequency and contextual diversity disentangled. To be specific, when contextual diversity is controlled, the word frequency effect is still present in the serial recall task, and the two effects are independent in memory performance, while the performance of words with high frequency and low contextual diversity is best. It is not clear that if we can get similar effects in other recall tasks. So the comparison of the two effects in more field and experimental paradigm may a better perspective and approach provide to clarify the relationship between the two.

Secondly, given the reality that word frequency is highly correlated with a number of other word features: word length, age at which the word was acquired, similarity to other words, other factors underlying word frequency and contextual diversity may influence word recognition. For example, Johns et al. [50] brought the concept of semantic diversity, it refers the account the number of different semantic contexts in which the word appears [48,50,51].

However, there are still objections on semantic diversity. First, semantic diversity is not much different from semantic richness used in existing research. Semantic richness is a multidimensional structure, including the number of semantic neighbors (NSN) of a word and the number of features associated with the indicator and its contextual dispersion (CD). Second, Plummer et al. [41] found that after controlling word frequency and semantic diversity, all the first pass words and subsequent reading times in words with low CD were higher than those of high CD words. After controlling the contextual diversity, there was no significant difference in the reading time of the low frequency words. This study strongly suggests that the influence of contextual diversity and word frequency on reading and word decision is not affected by semantic diversity.

Furthermore, if there are other factors that may influence word frequency and contextual diversity together, that is, if there are some underlying factors under the two variables. The meager evidence existed cannot proved it.

Finally, EEG, fMRI and other related electrophysiological means can provide us with important indicators for contextual diversity and word frequency in terms of word recognition. And research on patients with traumatic brain injury and other groups, may provide us new brain physiological mechanism perspective to reveal the relationship between the two in the word recognition. Previous studies have shown that word frequency effects appear in the memory of the mirror effect [52], that is, classes of stimuli that are accurately recognized as old when old are also accurately recognized as new when new; those that are poorly recognized as old when old are also poorly recognized as new when new. This phenomenon occurs in patients with Alzheimer's dementia [53,54], Korakov amnesia [55], midazolam amnesia [56] and other cognitive impairment in patients are widespread. In addition, the identification of word frequency effects in patients with schizophrenic patients such as schizophrenic patients is found to be more difficult to identify high frequency words than in low frequency words, possibly because high frequency words may be stored in long-term memory [57]. However, there has been no further study of the relationship between word frequency and contextual diversity from physiological mechanism perspective, which may limit our understanding of word recognition.

In conclusion, the relationship between contextual diversity and word frequency in the field of word recognition still needs further proof and explanation. Whether they could be replaced or have independent influence still needs further research to prove.

 

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