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Updated: May 19, 2026

Interaction between Phonological and Semantic Processes in Visual Word Recognition using Electrophysiology
Published on: June 29, 2021
Effects of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness on spoken word recognition
Brendan T Johns1, Thomas M Gruenenfelder, David B Pisoni
1Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, 1101 East 10th Street, Bloomington, Indiana 47405, USA. johns4@indiana.edu
Abstract:
The relative abilities of word frequency, contextual diversity, and semantic distinctiveness to predict accuracy of spoken word recognition in noise were compared using two data sets. Word frequency is the number of times a word appears in a corpus of text. Contextual diversity is the number of different documents in which the word appears in that corpus. Semantic distinctiveness takes into account the number of different semantic contexts in which the word appears. Semantic distinctiveness and contextual diversity were both able to explain variance above and beyond that explained by word frequency, which by itself explained little unique variance.
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