Latifi, Yasaman

Contextual Diversity in EFL Lexicon: Imageability, Concreteness, and Number of Senses in Focus

Contextual diversity, which is based on the concept that variation in a word's meaning is a continuous feature of variation in its context, may affect the development of adult EFL learners’ lexical quality and therefore causes individual differences in it (Hoffman & Woollams, 2015). On the other hand, other characteristics such as contextual diversity, imageability, concreteness, and the number of senses of a word may be the reason for these differences in lexical quality (Hsiao & Nation, 2018). Therefore, our understanding of lexical development can improve theoretical frameworks of teaching and materials development. It can also be used in computational word retrieva‎l and sentence processing models. Focusing on foreign-language lexical quality development, this research explores contextual diversity, imageability, concreteness, and the number of senses, as well as their relationship. Accordingly, this study assumes that contextual diversity measure would show a significant correlation with lexical quality as well as with imageability, concreteness and the number of senses. To investigate the mentioned hypotheses, a measure of contextual diversity was obtained at first. In two phases, this investigation examined the effect of contextual diversity on 30 EFL learners’ lexical decision-making and word recognition as a measure of lexical quality. The results revealed a relationship between contextual diversity and lexical quality, in which contextual diversity explains 41% of the variance in lexical knowledge. Finally, a correlation study was performed on contextual diversity, imageability, concreteness, and the number of senses, which demonstrates that these linguistic traits are positively correlated.