Do older adults and bilinguals organise words by context more?
A measure of how varied a word's contexts are explained word recognition speed best in everyone, but especially in older adults and bilinguals.
Source
The Role of Semantic Diversity in Word Recognition across Aging and Bilingualism
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — 2 (age) x 2 (monolingual/bilingual) group comparison on a lexical decision task, with regression of item RTs on corpus-derived word frequency, contextual diversity and semantic diversity (SDM) measures
- N
- N=86 · Four groups: young monolinguals (21), young bilinguals (28), older monolinguals (16), older bilinguals (21); a larger existing English Lexicon Project dataset was also reanalysed
- Population
- English monolingual and English-French bilingual adults aged 18-30 or 65+ in the Ottawa-Gatineau region, Canada
- Outcome
- Lexical decision reaction times and the unique variance in them explained by word frequency, contextual diversity and semantic diversity
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
What they did
Young and older adults who were either English monolinguals or English-French bilinguals decided as quickly as possible whether letter strings were real English words. The researchers then asked how well three corpus-based measures of each word's 'strength' predicted response times: raw word frequency, the number of documents a word appears in (contextual diversity), and a semantic distinctiveness model that weights contexts by how different they are (semantic diversity). They repeated the modelling across five different text corpora.
What they found
Older adults responded more slowly than younger adults, and young bilinguals were slower than young monolinguals, replicating standard findings. Semantic diversity explained the most unique variance in every group and corpus, while raw frequency added little. The variance explained by semantic diversity rose in a consistent order: young monolinguals, then young bilinguals and older monolinguals, then older bilinguals, for whom it was roughly double.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The groups were small (as few as 16 older monolinguals) and not randomly assigned, so age and bilingualism may be confounded with education or other differences. Only 150 real words were used, so item-level regressions rest on a limited set. The model shows that older adults and bilinguals rely more on contextual diversity, but the authors note it gives no mechanism for how that information is used during word retrieval. Bilingual proficiency was self-reported.
Key terms
- Lexical decision task
- A task in which people judge as fast as possible whether a letter string is a real word; reaction time indexes ease of word access.
- Word frequency effect
- The finding that commonly encountered words are recognised faster than rare ones.
- Contextual diversity
- The number of different documents or contexts in which a word appears, regardless of how often it appears in each.
- Semantic diversity
- How different in meaning the contexts containing a word are; a word used across very distinct topics is semantically diverse.
- Frequency lag hypothesis
- The proposal that bilinguals are slower at lexical access because they have encountered each word in a given language less often than monolinguals.
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Which group showed the largest semantic diversity effect?
Common questions
Why would bilinguals rely more on context?
Bilinguals must constantly decide which language to use, so information about the context a word belongs to may be especially useful for organising and selecting words.
Does slower responding in older adults mean cognitive decline?
The information accumulation view argues that slowing may partly reflect a larger store of linguistic knowledge to search, and this study fits the idea that accumulated experience changes how the lexicon is organised.
Why use five corpora?
To show the pattern was not an artefact of one particular text collection; the ordering of groups was the same across all of them.
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