Testing the Distributional Hypothesis 1 Running head: TESTING THE DISTRIBUTIONAL HYPOTHESIS Testing the Distributional Hypothesis: The Influence of Context on Judgments of Semantic Similarity

Distributional information has recently been implicated as playing an important role in several aspects of language ability. Learning the meaning of a word is thought to be dependent, at least in part, on exposure to the word in its linguistic contexts of use. In two experiments, we manipulated subjects’ contextual experience with marginally familiar and nonce words. Results showed that similarity judgments involving these words were affected by the distributional properties of the contexts in which they were read. The accrual of contextual experience was simulated in a semantic space model, by successively adding larger amounts of experience in the form of item-in-context exemplars sampled from the British National Corpus. The experiments and the simulation provide support for the role of distributional information in developing representations of word meaning. Testing the Distributional Hypothesis 3 Testing the Distributional Hypothesis: The Influence of Context on Judgments of