This site has been permanently archived. This is a static copy provided by the University of Southampton.

TY - GEN ID - cogprints3119 UR - http://cogprints.org/3119/ A1 - McDonald, Scott A1 - Brew, Chris TI - A distributional model of semantic context effects in lexical processinga Y1 - 2002/// N2 - 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 AV - public KW - lexical processing KW - semantic priming KW - word meaning KW - distributional information KW - Bayes' Law ER -