Influence of Context on the Activation and Selection of Ambiguous Word Senses

Oden, Gregg C.; Spira, James

doi:10.1080/14640748308402116

Cited by 84 publications

(70 citation statements)

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“…This finding suggests that the first word in the discordant condition was dampening or reducing facilitation for other meanings, but not to the extent that the contextually inappropriate meaning was no longer active. The suggestion of context-sensitive multiple access is consistent with the notion that all meanings of an ambiguous word are initially activated, even in the presence of strong lexical associates, but the degree of activation for particular meanings may differ as a function of meaning dominance or strong contextual constraints (Oden & Spira, 1983;Simpson, 1994).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 50%

Hemispheric Contributions to Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Individuals with Complex Language Impairment Following Left-Hemisphere Lesions

2002

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Nine individuals with complex language deficits following left-hemisphere cortical lesions and a matched control group (n ϭ 9) performed speeded lexical decisions on the third word of auditory word triplets containing a lexical ambiguity. The critical conditions were concordant (e.g., coin-bank-money), discordant (e.g., river-bank-money), neutral (e.g., day-bankmoney), and unrelated (e.g., river-day-money). Triplets were presented with an interstimulus interval (ISI) of 100 and 1250 ms. Overall, the left-hemisphere-damaged subjects appeared able to exhaustively access meanings for lexical ambiguities rapidly, but were unable to reduce the level of activation for contextually inappropriate meanings at both short and long ISIs, unlike control subjects. These findings are consistent with a disruption of the proposed role of the left hemisphere in selecting and suppressing meanings via contextual integration and a sparing of the right-hemisphere mechanisms responsible for maintaining alternative meanings. The study of lexical ambiguity processing in normals and individuals with unilateral lesions can provide insights into how the cerebral hemispheres make unique and possibly complementary contributions to language processing. With regard to language in general, it has been postulated that the right hemisphere coarsely codes a broad selection of semantic information, whereas the left hemisphere is involved in a finer processing of strongly related information possibly based on intentional selection and integration operations (Beeman & Chiarello, 1998). Other hemispheric differences documented in normals include the time course of semantic activation, the form of attentional/controlled processing conducted in each hemisphere, and differential sensitivity to certain forms of linguistic information (Collins, 1999;Federmeier & Kutas, 1999;Koivisto, 1999).These hemispheric processing capacities have been revealed, in part, through the study of lexical ambiguity. The structure of lexical ambiguities has provided a critical platform for investigating the functional architecture of the language processing system; specifically, speaking to the issue of whether lexical processing is modular We thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 50%

Hemispheric Contributions to Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Individuals with Complex Language Impairment Following Left-Hemisphere Lesions

2002

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“…There is consistent evidence that, immediately on occurrence of a lexically ambiguous word, multiple meanings of that word may be activated briefly. Supporting evidence comes from experiments using three different response measures: (1) pronunciation (Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982;Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Seidenberg, 1979), (2) lexical decision (Holley-Wilcox & Blank, 1980;Swinney, 1979), and (3) color naming (Conrad, 1974;Oden & Spira, 1983). Pronunciation latencies and lexical decisions to target words related to only one of the meanings of a preceding ambiguous word are facilitated, and interference in color naming occurs.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Further investigations of inhibitory mechanisms in attention

Lowe

1985

Memory & Cognition

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Three experiments employed a discrete-trials version of the Stroop task to investigate further the claim that there are inhibitory mechanisms in selective attention (Neill, 1977). The results i~dicated that the evidence supporting the inhibitory theory (i.e., the diminished availability of distractor responses) cannot be explained by subjects' attempts to physically match successive stimuli (Lowe, 1979). In light of all the available evidence, it was suggested that the suppression effect does not index attentional inhibition, but may be attributed to a problem of code coordination (Keele & Neill, 1978).Deployment of selective attention permits an observer to respond optimally to chosen aspects of stimulation while excluding other, unwanted aspects. An important question concerns how this selective processing is achieved. Treisman (1964) hypothesized that selection of one message for analysis and response may sometimes involve the attenuation of others. According to this account, selection of some information may entail direct and specific inhibition of other information.Evidence for the existence of some form of inhibition in the context of selective attention comes from recent experiments (Neill, 1977) employing the Stroop (1935) color-word task. The Stroop task requires subjects to name the ink color of a letter display while overcoming the tendency to read a different color name spelled by the letters. Employing a series of discrete trials, Neill (1977, Experiment 1) found that when two successive Stroop stimuli were related such that the color name of the second item (~2) matched the distracting word of the first (Sl), observers took longer to respond than when the sequential inputs were unrelated (the suppression effect). Neill (1977) reasoned that when the color for Sl is named, the name of the conflicting color word is actively suppressed. Then, if that inhibited name is the correct response for S2, the inhibition slows responding, producing the suppression effect. However, subsequent results did not support a simple inhibitory account. For example, Neill (1977, Experiment 2) found that S1 distractor responses remained continuously available, and facilitated responses for S2, when manual responding was substituted for vocal color naming. Lowe (1979, Experiment 3) also demonstrated a facilitatory effect during related trials when color patches were substituted for color-word stimuli as S2. Lastly, results by Neill (1977Neill ( , 1979) also indicated that inhibition varied with the relative demands for speed versus accuracy. More pronounced inhibitory effects were obtained when instructions emphasized accuracy of responding. It is evident that the suppression effect is extremely sensitive to a number of variations in experimental context. This phenomenon can be influenced by the nature of the response requirements as well as by other sequences and stimuli that appear in the task.In light of these complications, Lowe (1979) suggested that subjects did not treat the successive stimuli as discrete, but employe...

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“…Guttentag, Haith, Goodman, and Hauch (1984) The growing literature on the flanker task has been extended to the color-word and picture-word situations by Kahneman and Chajczyk (1983) and Glaser and Glaser (1989). Several studies also have investigated aspects of meaning using a priming procedure in a Stroop-like task (e.g., Conrad, 1974;Henik, Friedrich, & Kellogg, 1983;Oden & Spira, 1983;Regan, 1977Regan, , 1981Warren, 1972Warren, , 1974, but these are all saved for the more extensive discussion of semantic variation later.…”

Section: Other Analogs Of the Stroop Taskmentioning

confidence: 99%

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

MacLeod

1991

Psychological Bulletin

4,775

165

3,607

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The literature on interference in the Stroop Color-Word Task, covering over 50 years and some 400 studies, is organized and reviewed. In so doing, a set ofl 8 reliable empirical findings is isolated that must be captured by any successful theory of the Stroop effect. Existing theoretical positions are summarized and evaluated in view of this critical evidence and the 2 major candidate theories--relative speed of processing and automaticity of reading--are found to be wanting. It is concluded that recent theories placing the explanatory weight on parallel processing of the irrelevant and the relevant dimensions are likely to be more successful than are earlier theories attempting to locate a single bottleneck in attention.In 1935, J. R. Stroop published his landmark article on attention and interference, an article more influential now than it was then. Why has the Stroop task continued to fascinate us? Perhaps the task is seen as tapping into the primitive operations of cognition, offering clues to the fundamental process of attention. Perhaps the robustness of the phenomenon provides a special challenge to decipher. Together these are powerful attractions in a field of complex phenomena where the most subtie variation may exert a dramatic effect.In writing this article, I have two primary intentions. The first is to create a taxonomy of the empirical work on the Stroop task and its analogs. At least 70% of the more than 700 Strooprelated articles in the literature have been published since the reviews by Dyer (1973c) and Jensen and Rohwer (1966). Furthermore, Dyer's theoretical framework now seems in need of reconsideration, so that his review no longer provides the optimal organization. The second aim, then, is to survey existing theories, showing the critical weaknesses in the standard explanations and dispelling some myths that have arisen. I argue for a new theoretical framework for the Stroop effect, informed by contemporary cognitive psychology. This framework is more comprehensive than many earlier experiment-specific hypotheses, and suggests directions in which future research might profitably proceed.

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Influence of Context on the Activation and Selection of Ambiguous Word Senses

Cited by 84 publications

References 23 publications

Hemispheric Contributions to Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Individuals with Complex Language Impairment Following Left-Hemisphere Lesions

Hemispheric Contributions to Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Individuals with Complex Language Impairment Following Left-Hemisphere Lesions

Further investigations of inhibitory mechanisms in attention

Half a century of research on the Stroop effect: An integrative review.

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