ABSTRACT

Semantic diversity – a metric that captures variations in previous contextual experience with a word – influences children’s lexical decision and reading aloud. We investigated the effects of semantic diversity and frequency on children’s reading of words embedded in sentences, while eye movements were recorded. If semantic diversity and frequency reflect different aspects of experience that influence reading in different ways, they should show independent effects and perhaps even different processing signatures during reading. Forty-nine 9-year-olds read sentences containing high/low frequency and high/low diversity words, manipulated orthogonally. We observed main effects of both variables, with high frequency and high semantic diversity words being read more easily. These results show that variations in the amount and nature of contextual experience influence how easily words are processed during reading.

摘要

语义多样性（一种可以用单词捕获先前上下文体验中的变化的度量）会影响儿童的词汇决定和朗读。我们调查了语义多样性和频率对儿童阅读句子中嵌入单词的影响，同时记录了眼动。如果语义的多样性和频率反映了以不同方式影响阅读的体验的不同方面，则它们在阅读过程中应表现出独立的影响，甚至可能具有不同的处理特征。49名9岁儿童阅读包含高/低频率和高/低分集单词的句子，这些单词经过正交处理。我们观察到这两个变量的主要影响，高频和高语义多样性单词更容易阅读。