Context Availability and Sentence Availability Ratings for 3,000 English Words and their Association with Lexical Processing

Abstract

Words that can be easily placed in contexts are more easily processed, yet norms for context availability are limited. Here, participants rated 3,000 words for context availability and sentence availability, a new metric predicted to capture information relating to textual variation. Both variables were investigated alongside other word-level characteristics to explore lexical-semantic space. Analyses demonstrated that context availability and sentence availability are distinct. Context availability covaries with concreteness and imageability, while sentence availability captures information relating to contextual variation, frequency and ambiguity. Analyses of megastudy data showed that both context availability and sentence availability uniquely facilitated lexical decision performance.

Keywords

• semantics
• visual word processing
• language production