Word frequency effects have long served as an empirical and theoretical
test bed for theories of language processing. Recently, Contextual
Diversity (CD) has been proposed as a better metric of retrieval processes
than word frequency. Motivated by these findings, we sketch an active
account of lexical access during sentence processing: language users store
statistics about contextualized lexical representations and use
lexical-contextual relations to both construct context and predict words
given the context. In support of this hypothesis, we demonstrate that
language users store contextualized word representations and that CD
effects on reading time attenuate as discourse context is constructed.