Learning new meanings for known words: Perturbation of original meanings and retention of new meanings

Abstract

Learning a new, unrelated meaning for a known word faces competition from the word's original meaning. Moreover, the connection of the word with its original meaning also shows a subtle form of interference, a perturbation, when tested immediately after learning. However, the long-term effects of both types of interference are unclear. The present study paired both high and low frequency words with new unrelated meanings, testing the fate of new and original meanings on three different days over one week as a function of word familiarity. The results were that learners maintained memory for new meanings of high frequency words better than the new meanings of low frequency words over one week. Following learning, meaning decisions on high frequency words that required the original meaning of the trained word were delayed relative to decisions on control words - but only when testing was immediate and the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) between the trained word and its original meaning probe was 200 ms. When the SOA was 500 ms or when the test was delayed by one day or one week, no effect occurred. The findings indicate that in the learning of new meanings for known words, word familiarity benefits long-term retention of new meanings. The facilitation effect occurs along with a perturbation effect, in which the original meaning of a familiar word is made momentarily less accessible immediately after learning.

The impact of learning new meaning on the previously learned meaning of L2 ambiguous words: The role of semantic similarity

“…These could be reflected by the change of the N400 or LPC amplitudes on the probe word relative to the unlearned condition. According to the Suppression Hypothesis or Re-consolidation Hypothesis (Fang & Perfetti, 2019), we predicted the N400 amplitude of the URN (the unrelated new meaning learning) condition may be larger than that of the RN (the related new meaning learning) condition and the unlearned condition. The LPC amplitude of the URN condition may be smaller than the RN and the unlearned condition.…”

“…They suggest that the perturbation effect might result from a transient interaction of new and previously learned meanings during learning, involving a suppression of the original meaning so as to learn the new meaning. This could be reckoned as the Suppression Hypothesis (Fang & Perfetti, 2019).…”

“…In addition, Fang and Perfetti (2019) also proposed another possible explanation for the perturbation effect, that is, the Re-consolidation Hypothesis. According to the complementary learning system (CLS) Model (Davis & Gaskell, 2009), consolidation is necessary for the transformation of short-term memories into long-term memories.…”

Learning new words: memory reactivation as a mechanism for strengthening and updating a novel word´s meaning

“…In addition, it is important to note that the reminder only includes the words, not the definitions, which is the information that we evaluated on the final cued-recall test. Thirdly, although we consider the semantic judgment task used in Experiment 2 as a reliable marker of lexical integration based on previous studies (Bakker et al, 2015;Kaczer et al, 2018), it is also possible that participants can perform the task by accessing relevant episodic memories (Fang & Perfetti, 2019). Although the characteristics of the task, such as the short stimuli onset asynchrony, make it difficult to depend mostly on episodic retrieval, it is impossible to fully exclude its influence on the decision.…”

HEROÍNA: Drug or hero? Meaning-dependent valence norms for ambiguous Spanish words

“…In the clinical context, for example, ambiguous emotional words could be used as an indirect measure to differentiate between populations, such as people with/without depression (Mogg et al, 2006) or people with/without dementia (Taler et al, 2009). Turning to the educational context, we note that ambiguity (e.g., Degani & Tokowicz, 2010;Fang & Perfetti, 2019) and emotionality (e.g., Altarriba & Basnight-Brown, 2011; Ferré, Ventura, Comesaña, & Fraga, 2015) are two variables that influence learning. For instance, Degani and Tokowicz (2010) found that ambiguous words are harder to learn than unambiguous words.…”