Norman, Rebecca; (2025) The influence of contextual diversity on lexical processing and new word learning. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

From mid-childhood onwards and into adulthood, the majority of new vocabulary is acquired through reading. However, relatively little is known about what properties of text best support learning. Influential theories of vocabulary acquisition suggest that contextual diversity, a measure of the variability of the contexts in which words are experienced, is key to successful word learning. The work presented in this thesis combines two streams of evidence that support a role for contextual diversity in vocabulary acquisition. Chapter 2 is a comprehensive scoping review of 145 experiments investigating the relationship between diversity metrics derived from large corpora and the processing of known words. Results show that high diversity facilitates word form processing regardless of task or operationalisation of diversity, but that effects on meaning processing are task dependent. Chapters 3 and 4 present three experiments with adult participants that directly assess the impact of contextual diversity on new word learning. Experiment 1 finds no diversity effect on word form processing, but that high diversity facilitates generalisation of newly learned word meanings to new contexts. Experiments 2 and 3 use a similar paradigm but include a direct assessment of word meaning extraction to provide deeper insight into the diversity effects seen in Experiment 1. These also obtain null effects on form processing and show that the high diversity advantage for meaning generalisation depends upon participants extracting a robust underlying meaning representation. Chapter 5 is a computational analysis of the stimuli used in Chapters 3 and 4. This explores what is learnable from the stimuli, and whether other sources of uncontrolled variation in the stimuli may have impacted learning. Together this work demonstrates that contextual diversity is a multi-faceted construct that influences both the early stages of word learning and later processing of familiar words.

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