Assessing lexical ambiguity of simplified Chinese characters: Plurality and relatedness of character meanings

Abstract

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive among Chinese characters as many of them are polysemantic, with one orthographic form carrying unrelated meanings, related meanings, or sometimes both unrelated and related meanings. A large-scale database with ambiguity measures for simplified Chinese characters has yet to be developed, which could greatly benefit psycholinguistic research on the Chinese language or cross-language comparisons. This article reports two sets of ratings by native speakers, the perceived number of meanings (pNoM) for 4363 characters and the perceived relatedness of meanings (pRoM) for a subset of 1053 characters. These rating-based ambiguity measures capture the representational nuance about a character’s meanings stored in average native speakers’ mental lexicon, which tends to be obscured by dictionary- and corpus-based ambiguity measures. Consequently, they each account for a reliable portion of variance in the efficiency of character processing, above and beyond the effects of character frequency, age of acquisition, and other types of ambiguity measures. Theoretical and empirical implications with regard to the plurality and the relatedness of character meanings, the two focal aspects of debate on lexical ambiguity, are discussed.

Probing Lexical Ambiguity in Chinese Characters via Their Word Formations: Convergence of Perceived and Computed Metrics

“…In our recent study (Chen, Xu, & Wang, 2023), a group of 1088 native speakers of Mandarin Chinese were recruited (see Table S1 in the Supporting Information for detailed demographical information of the participants). Each of them was assigned with a batch of 132-133 characters and was instructed to assess the number of different meanings for each character based on their lexical knowledge.…”