Contextual Learning of New Meanings for Familiar Word Forms from Reading and Listening to Stories

Both first (L1) and second (L2) language speakers learn new meanings of known words through reading and listening. This learning results in changes in the mental lexicon, including adjustments to how existing (old) meanings are accessed. To investigate how the lexical-semantic space changes as a result of learning new meanings through encountering them multiple times in context, two studies were conducted.

Study 1 was a conceptual replication and extension of Hulme et al. (2018). Fifty-two native English speakers read four short stories which contained critical words with invented secondary meanings (e.g., cake was given a new meaning a tribal headdress). The number of exposures to the critical words was manipulated (i.e., 2,4,6,8) within items and within participants. Explicit knowledge was assessed through a cued recall test of meaning and cued recall of form. The effect of acquisition of new unrelated meanings on the processing of the old meanings was operationalised using a semantic relatedness judgement (SRJ) task. The results of the immediate recall tests of form and meaning corroborated Hulme et al.’s findings: multiple encounters with the secondary meanings produced substantial explicit knowledge, and more explicit knowledge of the meaning was produced with more exposures. An inhibitory effect in the SRJ task was found for the trained (but not the untrained) targets, suggesting competition between newly acquired and well-established meanings. A stronger inhibitory effect was found when the exposures were lower (2 and 4) than when the exposures were higher (6 and 8), indicating that number of exposures modulates the degree of competition.

Study 2 investigated how secondary meanings of known words are learned from listening. L1 and L2 adult English speakers (56 participants in each group) listened to recorded stories in which context variability (i.e., varied or repeated contexts) was manipulated. The measures of learning were the same as in Study 1, but a cross-modal version of the SRJ task (where critical words were presented auditorily and meaning probes visually) was used. Both L1 and L2 participants learned the new meanings through listening to the short stories, regardless of context variability conditions. L1 participants performed significantly better than their L2 counterparts, and participants who scored higher on a comprehension test scored significantly better on both tasks. Results from the SRJ task showed that encountering new (unrelated) meanings of known words during listening created a perturbation effect ( on the processing of previously known meanings. This effect was observed on both response accuracy and reaction times measures. Overall, the results suggest that changes were taking place in the lexical-semantic space: semantic competition between the old and new unrelated meanings slowed down the recognition of old meanings and created more errors when judging the old meanings.

This research builds a more detailed picture of changes in the mental lexicon resulting from contextual learning of new unrelated meanings, and whether these changes are affected by number of exposures, context variability, comprehension, and language group.