Rethinking context availability for concrete and abstract words: a corpus study

Over the past five decades, psycholinguists have uncovered robust differences in the processing of concrete and abstract words. One of these findings is that it is easier for people to generate possible contexts for concrete words than for abstract words; that is, concrete words seem to have higher "context availability" (CA). It is not clear why this difference exists, but some have suggested that concrete words may be used in a smaller variety of semantic contexts. In this paper, we review the relevant psycholinguistic literature and report on a previous corpus-based attempt to investigate this property of abstract and concrete words. We then extend the current methods by introducing an information theoretic measure that we use to test the validity of CA. The result runs counter to current thinking in psycholinguistics and suggests a rethinking of context availability.