Contextual diversity favors the learning of new words in children regardless of their comprehension skills

Abstract

Recent research has shown the benefits of high contextual diversity, defined as the number of different contexts in which a word appears, when incidentally learning new words. These benefits have been found both in laboratory settings and in ecological settings such as the classroom during regular hours. To examine the nature of this effect in young readers aged 11–13 years, we analyzed whether these benefits are modulated by the individuals’ reading comprehension scores; that is, would better comprehenders benefit the most from contextual diversity? The manipulation of contextual diversity was done by inserting the novel words into three different contexts/topics, or into only one of them, while keeping constant their frequency of occurrence. Results showed that words encountered in different contexts were learned more effectively than those presented in the same context. More important, the effect of contextual diversity was similar regardless of the participants’ comprehension skills. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of word learning and the practical applications in curriculum design.