The influence of place and time on lexical behavior: A distributional analysis

Abstract

We measured and documented the influence of corpus effects on lexical behavior. Specifically, we used a corpus of over 26,000 fiction books to show that computational models of language trained on samples of language (i.e., subcorpora) representative of the language located in a particular place and time can track differences in people’s experimental language behavior. This conclusion was true across multiple tasks (lexical decision, category production, and word familiarity) and provided insight into the influence that language experience imposes on language processing and organization. We used the assembled corpus and methods to validate a new machine-learning approach for optimizing language models, entitled experiential optimization (Johns, Jones, & Mewhort in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 26, 103–126, 2019).