Contributions of semantic and contextual diversity to the word frequency effect in L2 lexical access.

Abstract

Word frequency has long been viewed as the best predictor of lexical access. However, recent findings have suggested that other corpus-derived metrics (i.e., contextual diversity, semantic diversity) can better explain the word frequency effect in both native speakers and in proficient bilinguals. However, little is known about the contributions of these variables to second language lexical access, where the word frequency effect is purportedly larger than in native speakers. Results from a lexical-decision task with second language learners and a comparison group of native speakers revealed that both contextual diversity and semantic diversity were just as good, if not better, at explaining variance in lexical decision latencies as word frequency. These findings are broadly consistent with that of monolinguals and proficiency bilinguals. The results also underscore the need for more theoretical and empirical focus on different corpus metrics in modelling lexical access. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).