creators_name: McDonald, Scott creators_name: Brew, Chris type: preprint datestamp: 2003-08-27 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:20 metadata_visibility: show title: A distributional model of semantic context effects in lexical processinga subjects: psy-ling full_text_status: public keywords: lexical processing, semantic priming, word meaning, distributional information, Bayes' Law 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 date: 2002 date_type: published refereed: FALSE referencetext: Altarriba, J., Kroll, J., Sholl, A. & Rayner, K. (1996). The influence of lexical and conceptual constraints on reading mixed-language sentences: Evidence from eye fixations and naming times. Memory & Cognition, 24, 477-492. Altmann, G. T. M. & Kamide, Y. (1999). Incremental interpretation at verbs: restricting the domain of subsequent reference. Cognition, 73, 247-264. Anderson, J. R. (1983). 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