Category: New Preprint

Rachael Hulme and Jenni Rodd looked at how adults integrate new word meanings with existing knowledge when learning new homonyms (e.g. internet-related meaning of “troll”).

link to preprint: https://psyarxiv.com/9fpua

They were interetested in whether sleep plays a role as has previously shown for learning new word forms (e.g. “cathedruke”).

In two experiments adults learned new fictional meanings for low-ambiguity words (e.g., “foam”) through naturalistic story reading. Their memory for the new meanings was tested after 12hrs either including or not including overnight sleep.

They found that a 12hr period including sleep led to better recall and recognition of new word meanings than 12hrs awake. This sleep benefit was specific to when sleep occurred immediately between learning and test, without any extended period of wake in-between. They did not find direct evidence of an active benefit of sleep for consolidating memories of new word meanings; the sleep benefit could be due to the absence of interference from other linguistic input while asleep.

Expt 2 was preregistered, and all materials, data & analysis code are available via the OSF: https://osf.io/m3pj6

A new preprint By Rachael Hulme, Anisha Begum, Kate Nation and Jenni Rodd looks at how contextual diversity affects early stages of word learning.

Diversity of narrative context disrupts the early stage of learning the meanings of novel words

There’s an important distinction between ‘situational diversity’ (i.e. the context in which words occur) and ‘heterogeneity’ (i.e. polysemy/diversity in words’ meanings). These typically co-occur in natural language, so we wanted to tease contextual diversity apart from polysemy.

Adults learned new words and their meanings by reading paragraphs with either five different narrative contexts or a single coherent narrative context. We controlled the semantic features of word meanings across conditions to avoid influences from polysemy.

Diversity of narrative context did not affect word-form learning but disrupted learning of word meanings – more semantic features were correctly recalled for words learned in a single coherent narrative context.

So in the early stages of learning meanings of new words, learning is boosted by anchoring them to a single coherent narrative discourse. The temporary representations that are built to support discourse comprehension may play an important role in supporting word learning.

The expt was preregistered, and materials, data & analysis code are available via OSF: https://osf.io/2bnw3

Here’s a poster summary of this research: https://bit.ly/3qZ7BSo