Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Word frequency effects have long served as an empirical andtheoretical test bed for theories of language processing. Anumber of recent studies have suggested that Contextual Di-versity (CD) is a better metric of retrieval processes than wordfrequency. Motivated by these findings, we sketch an activeaccount of lexical access during sentence processing: lan-guage users store statistics about contextualized lexical rep-resentations and use lexical-contextual relations to both con-struct context and predict words given the context. In linewith our account, we provide evidence from a frequency judg-ment experiment suggesting that words are not stored indepen-dently of their contexts of use. To further examine CD effectsin reading, we analyzed reading times in self-paced readingand eye-tracking corpora. We demonstrate that as context isconstructed, the role of CD in lexical retrieval is attenuated,reflecting a trade-off between context construction and contex-tualized word prediction.