EXPRESS: Learning words in diverse narrative contexts disrupts subsequent recall of their meanings

Recent research suggests that encountering words in varied narrative contexts may disrupt the earliest stage of learning (Hulme et al., 2023). The current experiments explore (i) how this diversity disadvantage changes over learning, and (ii) whether diversity primarily impacts encoding or subsequent recall. Adults (Experiment 1: N = 105; Experiment 2: N = 111) encountered novel words with invented meanings within narrative paragraphs across three days. Words were presented within one coherent narrative (low diversity) or across nine different narratives (high diversity). We replicated Hulme e