ArticlePsychonomic bulletin & review2023
Diversity of narrative context disrupts the early stage of learning the meanings of novel words.
Article in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effects of contextual diversity on lexical processing: A scoping review.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Contextual diversity and anchoring: Null effects on learning word forms and opposing effects on learning word meanings.Quarterly journal of experimental psychology (2006) · 2024Article
- When is a word in good company for learning?Developmental science · 2024Article
- NewAbstractConcepts: A Database of 42 Normed Abstract Concepts and Exemplars.Journal of cognition · 2024Article
- Learning Spelling From Meaning.Experimental psychology · 2023Article
- The Role of Sleep in Learning New Meanings for Familiar Words through Stories.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
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4 authors.
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Abstract
High quality lexical representations develop through repeated exposures to words in different contexts. This preregistered experiment investigated how diversity of narrative context affects the earliest stages of word learning via reading. Adults (N = 100) learned invented meanings for eight pseudowords, which each occurred in five written paragraphs either within a single coherent narrative context or five different narrative contexts. The words' semantic features were controlled across conditions to avoid influences from polysemy (lexical ambiguity). Posttests included graded measures of word-form recall (spelling accuracy) and recognition (multiple choice), and word-meaning recall (number of semantic features). Diversity of narrative context did not affect word-form learning, but more semantic features were correctly recalled for words trained in a single context. These findings indicate that learning the meanings of novel words is initially boosted by anchoring them to a single coherent narrative discourse.
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