Context Availability and Sentence Availability Ratings for 3,000 English Words and their Association with Lexical Processing

Ellen Taylor,Yaling Hsiao,Kate Nation

doi:10.5334/joc.211

Abstract

Words that can be easily placed in contexts are more easily processed, yet norms for context availability are limited. Here, participants rated 3,000 words for context availability and sentence availability, a new metric predicted to capture information relating to textual variation. Both variables were investigated alongside other word-level characteristics to explore lexical-semantic space. Analyses demonstrated that context availability and sentence availability are distinct. Context availability covaries with concreteness and imageability, while sentence availability captures information relating to contextual variation, frequency and ambiguity. Analyses of megastudy data showed that both context availability and sentence availability uniquely facilitated lexical decision performance.

Highlights

Some words are easier to contextualise than others
context availability (CA) was positively correlated with imageability but not correlated with semantic diversity whereas sentence availability (SA) was positively correlated with both diversity and imageability
Semantic diversity loaded in the same direction as CA for occurrence, but the opposite direction for richness

Summary

Introduction

Some words are easier to contextualise than others. This is captured by context availability, a metric that refers to how people can think of an imagined situation or circumstance. Our starting point in this paper is with the relationship between context availability (CA) and semantic diversity Both measures index contextual experience, but in rather different ways, with CA being a subjective measure of how a situational context can be activated, and semantic diversity being derived from large corpora based on linguistic context. The relationship between these variables is unclear in the literature. This would allow us to directly compare situational and linguistic availability for the same words, and to consider how both relate to other lexical variables, and to lexical processing itself

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Conclusion