Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Children who read more tend to be better readers than children who read less. Reading exposure captures not onlythe number of times words are experienced but also the breadth of the contexts words appear in. Using a large children’s corpusof written language, we quantified the former as word frequency and the latter as Semantic Diversity (SemD) (Hoffman etal., 2013). SemD was indexed using Latent Semantic Analysis to calculate the degree of semantic dissimilarity between thecontexts in which each appeared. We selected 300 words that varied in SemD for a visual lexical decision and naming task with9-year-old children (N=114). Results showed that both frequency and SemD were associated with performance, independentlyaccounting for variation in speed and accuracy. Those words high in frequency and high in SemD were read more efficiently.These findings show that factors beyond frequency are important in determining children’s word reading.