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A distributional model of semantic context effects in lexical processinga

McDonald, Scott and Brew, Chris (2002) A distributional model of semantic context effects in lexical processinga. [Preprint]

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Abstract

One of the most robust findings of experimental psycholinguistics is that the context in which a word is presented influences the effort involved in processing that word. We present a novel model of contextual facilitation based on word co-occurrence prob ability distributions, and empirically validate the model through simulation of three representative types of context manipulation: single word priming, multiple-priming and contextual constraint. In our simulations the effects of semantic context are mod eled using general-purpose techniques and representations from multivariate statistics, augmented with simple assumptions reflecting the inherently incremental nature of speech understanding. The contribution of our study is to show that special-purpose m echanisms are not necessary in order to capture the general pattern of the experimental results, and that a range of semantic context effects can be subsumed under the same principled account.›o

Item Type:Preprint
Keywords:lexical processing, semantic priming, word meaning, distributional information, Bayes' Law
Subjects:Psychology > Psycholinguistics
ID Code:3119
Deposited By: McDonald, Scott
Deposited On:27 Aug 2003
Last Modified:11 Mar 2011 08:55

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