Lexical ambiguity and the timecourse of attentional allocation in word recognition.

Kellas, George; Ferraro, F. Richard; Simpson, Greg B.

doi:10.1037/0096-1523.14.4.601

Cited by 123 publications

(172 citation statements)

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“…She found no effect of ambiguity over and above familiarity. Since then, however, several papers have reported an ambiguity advantage in visual lexical decision experiments using stimuli that were controlled for familiarity (e.g., Azuma & Van Orden, 1997;Borowsky & Masson, 1996;Hino & Lupker, 1996;Kellas, Ferraro, & Simpson, 1988;Millis & Button, 1989;Pexman & Lupker, 1999). Although these studies vary in the robustness of the effects they report, their cumulative weight has had the effect of establishing the ambiguity advantage as an important constraint on theories of lexical representation and lexical access.…”

Section: The Ambiguity Advantagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Kellas et al (1988) assume that words are represented by individual nodes within an inhibitory lexical network. They suggest that while the multiple nodes of an ambiguous word do not inhibit each other, they both act independently to inhibit all other competing entries, and this increased inhibition of competitors produces the faster recognition times.…”

Section: The Ambiguity Advantagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Their ambiguous and unambiguous words were taken from Fera, Joordens, Balota, Ferraro, Besner (1992), who asked participants to rate whether a word had no meaning, one meaning, or more than one meaning. This is the same procedure that was used by Kellas et al (1988) and Hino and Lupker (1996). We chose to look in detail at the Borowsky and Masson (1996) stimuli because their result was the one of these where the effect of ambiguity was statistically significant and because they used the largest set of words.…”

Section: Word Senses and Word Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access

Rodd

Gaskell

Marslen–Wilson

2002

Journal of Memory and Language

454

619

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There have been several reports in the literature of faster visual lexical decisions to words that are semantically ambiguous. All current models of this ambiguity advantage assume that it is the presence of multiple unrelated meanings that produce this benefit. A set of three lexical decision experiments reported here challenge this assumption. We contrast the ambiguity seen in words like bark, which have multiple unrelated meanings, with words that have multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). In all three experiments we find that while multiple word senses do produce faster responses, ambiguity between multiple meanings delays recognition. These results suggest that, while competition between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words delays their recognition, the rich semantic representations associated with words with many senses facilitate their recognition. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: lexical ambiguity; polysemy; distributed semantic representations.Many words are semantically ambiguous, and can refer to more than one concept. For example, bark can refer either to a part of a tree or to the sound made by a dog. To understand such words, we must select one of these different interpretations, normally on the basis of the context in which the word occurs.Words can be ambiguous in different ways; a word like bark has two semantically unrelated meanings, which seem to share the same written and spoken form purely by chance. More common than this type of accidental ambiguity is the systematic ambiguity between related word senses. For example, the word twist has a range of dictionary definitions including to make into a coil or spiral, to operate by turning, to alter the shape of, to misconstrue the meaning of, to wrench or sprain, and to squirm or writhe. The meaning of this word varies systematically according to the context in which the word is used; for example, there are important differences between what it means to twist an ankle compared with to twist the truth. However, although the meaning of the word is ambiguous between these different interpretations, the interpretations are closely related to each other both etymologically and semantically; this is quite unlike the ambiguity for a word like bark.

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Section: The Ambiguity Advantagementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Ambiguity Advantagementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Word Senses and Word Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access

Rodd

Gaskell

Marslen–Wilson

2002

Journal of Memory and Language

454

619

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“…The focus of the literature at large has primarily been on whether semantically ambiguous words (homographs) are processed differently from unambiguous words and how meaning retrieval of ambiguous words is affected by prior context (see review by Van Petten, 2002). The literature suggests that certain aspects of word recognition may be facilitated for words with multiple meanings (as seen in, for example, word naming tasks, lexical decision tasks, and definition generation tasks) (Jastrzembski, 1981;Jastrzembski and Stanners, 1975;Kellas et al, 1988), while meaning selection or phoneme monitoring may often (or always) be more difficult for these words (Cairns and Kamerman, 1975;Hino et al, 2002). Most studies looking at the role of context in modulating meaning access for ambiguous words have used the contextambiguity-probe paradigm (CAP, described below), though some eyetracking and ERP studies have managed to directly analyze the processing of the ambiguous words themselves.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

To mind the mind: An event-related potential study of word class and semantic ambiguity

Lee

Federmeier

2006

Brain Research

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The goal of this study was to jointly examine the effects of word class, word class ambiguity, and semantic ambiguity on the brain response to words in syntactically specified contexts. Four types of words were used: (1) word class ambiguous words with a high degree of semantic ambiguity (e.g., 'duck'); (2) word class ambiguous words with little or no semantic ambiguity (e.g., 'vote'); (3) word class unambiguous nouns (e.g., 'sofa'); and (4) word class unambiguous verbs (e.g., 'eat'). These words were embedded in minimal phrases that explicitly specified their word class: "the" for nouns (and ambiguous words used as nouns) and "to" for verbs (and ambiguous words used as verbs). Our results replicate the basic word class effects found in prior work (Federmeier, K.D., Segal, J.B., Lombrozo, T., Kutas, M., 2000. Brain responses to nouns, verbs and class ambiguous words in context. Brain, 123 (12), 2552-2566), including an enhanced N400 (250-450ms) to nouns compared with verbs and an enhanced frontal positivity (300-700 ms) to unambiguous verbs in relation to unambiguous nouns. A sustained frontal negativity (250-900 ms) that was previously linked to word class ambiguity also appeared in this study but was specific to word class ambiguous items that also had a high level of semantic ambiguity; word class ambiguous items without semantic ambiguity, in contrast, were more positive than class unambiguous words in the early part of this time window (250-500 ms). Thus, this frontal negative effect seems to be driven by the need to resolve the semantic ambiguity that is sometimes associated with different grammatical uses of a word class ambiguous homograph rather than by the class ambiguity per se.

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“…Recent publications have reported click detection during visual word recognition (Kellas et al, 1988) and during music recognition (Berent and Perfetti, 1993); we are further aware of current research projects using click detection with auditory sentence or word processing in laboratories in the USA, France, Italy and the UK (including our own laboratories; see, e.g., (Akeroyd, 1992)). It seemed timely, therefore, to seek the further information on the task for which Cutler and Norris (1979) called.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Problems with click detection: Insights from cross-linguistic comparisons

Cutler¹,

Kearns²,

Norris³

et al. 1993

Speech Communication

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Abstract. Cross-linguistic comparisons may shed light on the levels of processing involved in the performance of psycholinguistic tasks. For instance, if the same pattern of results appears whether or not subjects understand the experimental materials, it may be concluded that the results do not reflect higher-level linguistic processing. In the present study, English and French listeners performed two tasks -click location and speeded click detection -with both English and French senlences, closely matched for syntactic and phonological structure. Clicks were located more accurately in open-than in closed-class words in both English and French; they were detected more rapidly in open-than in closed-class words in English, but not in French. The two listener groups produced the same pattern of responses, suggesting that higher-level linguistic processing was not involved in the listeners' responses. It is concluded that click detection tasks are primarily sensitive to low-level (e.g. acoustic) effects, and hence are not well suited to the investigation of linguistic processing. R6sum6. Les comparaisons interlangues peuvent Eclaircir les niveaux de tra]tement impliquEs dans t'ex6cution des tfiches psycholinguistiques. Par exemple, si l'on observe le m~me type de rEponses, que les sujets comprennent le mat6riel experimental ou non, on peut en conclure que ces rdsultats ne refl~tent point des processus linguistiques de haut-niveau. Dans cette experience des auditeurs fran §ais et anglais ont accompli deux tfiches -localisation de clics et detection de clics acc61Er6e -en phrases fran~aises, et en phrases anglaises. Ces phrases Etaient bien appareill6es au niveau de leur structure syntaxique et phonologique. Les clics Etaient localisEs avec plus de precision dans les mots ~ contenu que dans les mots fonction en anglais, mais non en fran~ais. Les deux groupes d'auditeurs ont manifestE ces m~mes rEsultats; ce qui semble indiquer que les processus linguistiques de haut-niveau ne jouaient aucun r61e dans la performance des auditeurs. En conclusion on peut dire que la detection de clics est une tfiche qui est sensible principalement aux effets de bas-niveau, par exemple des effets acoustiques, et donc ne se prate gu~re ~ l'6tude des processus linguistiques.

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Lexical ambiguity and the timecourse of attentional allocation in word recognition.

Cited by 123 publications

References 29 publications

Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access

Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access

To mind the mind: An event-related potential study of word class and semantic ambiguity

Problems with click detection: Insights from cross-linguistic comparisons

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