Disentangling contextual diversity: Communicative need as a lexical organizer

Contextual diversity (CD; Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, 2006) modifies word frequency by ignoring word repetition in context. It has been repeatedly found that a CD count provides a better fit to lexical organization data than does word frequency (e.g., Adelman & Brown, 2008; Brysbaert & New, 2009). The importance of CD has been interpreted with the principle of likely need, adapted from the rational analysis of memory (Anderson & Schooler, 1991), which states that words that have been used in many past contexts are more likely to be needed in a future context. Central to the cognitive mechanisms of computing likely need is a definition of linguistic context itself. Typically, linguistic context is defined by relatively small units of language, such as a document within a corpus. However, recent research has demonstrated that larger definitions of context, some spanning tens or hundreds of thousands of words, provide a better accounting of lexical organization data (Johns, Dye, & Jones, 2020). This article attempts to redefine the notion of linguistic context by using socially based contextual measures, derived from the online communication patterns of hundreds of thousands of individuals from the discussion forum Reddit, consisting of over 55 billion words. Multiple count-based and semantic diversity models of contextual diversity were derived from this data. The results demonstrate that the communication patterns of individuals across discourses provides the best accounting of lexical organization data, indicating that classic notions of using local linguistic context to update a word's strength in the lexicon need to be reevaluated. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).