Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Our knowledge of words consists of a lexico-semantic network in which different words and their meanings are connected by relations, such as similarity in meaning. This research investigated the integration of new words into lexico-semantic networks. Specifically, we investigated whether new words can rapidly become linked with familiar words given exposure to distributional regularities that are ubiquitous in real-world language input, in which familiar and new words either: (1) directly co-occur in sentences, or (2) never co-occur, but instead share each other’s patterns of co-occurrence with another word. We observed that, immediately after sentence reading, familiar words came to be primed not only by new words with which they co-occurred in sentences, but also by new words with which they shared co- occurrence. This finding represents a novel demonstration that new words can be rapidly integrated into lexico-semantic networks from exposure to distributional regularities.