Recent research has shown contextual diversity (i.e., the number of passages in which a given word appears) to be a reliable predictor of word' processing difficulty. It has also been demonstrated that word-frequency has little or no effect on word recognition speed when accounting for contextual diversity in isolated word processing tasks. An eye-movement experiment was conducted wherein the effects of word-frequency and contextual diversity were directly contrasted in a normal sentence reading scenario. Subjects read, sentences with embedded target words that varied in word-frequency and contextual diversity. All lst-pass and later reading timeswere significantly longer for words with lower contextual diversity compared to words with higher contextual diversity when controlling for word- frequency and other important lexical properties: Furthermore, there was no difference in reading times for higher frequency and lower frequency words when controlling for contextual diversity. The results confirm prior findings regarding contextual diversity and word-frequency effects and demonstrate that contextual diversity is a more accurate predictor of word processing speed than word-frequency within a normal reading task.
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