Long-term priming of the meanings of ambiguous words

Rodd, Jennifer M; Cutrin, Belen Lopez; Kirsch, H.; Millar, Alessandra; Davis, Matthew H.

doi:10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.002

Cited by 77 publications

(288 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Recent research by Rodd, Lopez Cutrin, Kirsch, Millar, and Davis (2013) supports this notion. Participants were more likely to generate associates for a primed meaning of a homonymous word despite the fact that the primed meaning was often associated with the subordinate sense.…”

Section: Changes In Meanings Over Timementioning

confidence: 86%

How meaning similarity influences ambiguous word processing: the current state of the literature

Eddington

Tokowicz

2014

Psychon Bull Rev

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The majority of words in the English language do not correspond to a single meaning, but rather correspond to two or more unrelated meanings (i.e., are homonyms) or multiple related senses (i.e., are polysemes). It has been proposed that the different types of “semantically-ambiguous words” (i.e., words with more than one meaning) are processed and represented differently in the human mind. Several review papers and books have been written on the subject of semantic ambiguity (e.g., Adriaens, Small, Cottrell, & Tanenhaus, 1988; Burgess & Simpson, 1988; Degani & Tokowicz, 2010; Gorfein, 1989, 2001; Simpson, 1984). However, several more recent studies (e.g., Klein & Murphy, 2001; Klepousniotou, 2002; Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007; Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002) have investigated the role of the semantic similarity between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words on processing and representation, whereas this was not the emphasis of previous reviews of the literature. In this review, we focus on the current state of the semantic ambiguity literature that examines how different types of ambiguous words influence processing and representation. We analyze the consistent and inconsistent findings reported in the literature and how factors such as semantic similarity, meaning/sense frequency, task, timing, and modality affect ambiguous word processing. We discuss the findings with respect to recent parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of ambiguity processing (Armstrong & Plaut, 2008, 2011; Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004). Finally, we discuss how experience/instance-based models (e.g., Hintzman, 1986; Reichle & Perfetti, 2003) can inform a comprehensive understanding of semantic ambiguity resolution.

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Section: Changes In Meanings Over Timementioning

confidence: 86%

How meaning similarity influences ambiguous word processing: the current state of the literature

Eddington

Tokowicz

2014

Psychon Bull Rev

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“…In addition to these long-term effects of experience, recent experimental evidence has shown that more encounters with particular, subordinate interpretations of ambiguous words can substantially boost the availability of these primed meanings (Betts, Gilbert, Cai, Okedara, & Rodd, 2018;Gaskell, Cairney, & Rodd, 2019;Gilbert, Davis, Gaskell, & Rodd, 2018;Rodd, Lopez Cutrin, Kirsch, Millar, & Davis, 2013). In word-meaning priming experiments, participants encounter a subordinate meaning of an ambiguous word within a strongly disambiguating sentence context (e.g., "The farmer moved the sheep into the PEN").…”

Section: (Iii) Contextual Modulation Of Unambiguous Word Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Then, after a delay (typically 20-40 minutes) the availability of the word's different meanings is assessed using tasks such as word association or semantic relatedness judgement (Betts et al, 2018;Gaskell et al, 2019;Gilbert et al, 2018;Rodd et al, 2016Rodd et al, , 2013. Results from these different paradigms have consistently shown that the availability of the primed, subordinate word meaning is boosted compared to a control, unprimed condition.…”

Section: (Iii) Contextual Modulation Of Unambiguous Word Meaningsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Word meaning access: The one-to-many mapping from form to meaning

Rodd¹

2019

Preprint

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This chapter focuses on the process by which stored knowledge about a word's form (orthographic or phonological) maps onto stored knowledge about its meaning. This mapping is made challenging by the ambiguity that is ubiquitous in natural language: most familiar words can refer to multiple different concepts. This one-to-many mapping from form to meaning within the lexicon is a core feature of word-meaning access. Fluent, accurate word-meaning access requires that comprehenders integrate multiple cues in order to determine which of a word's possible semantic features are relevant in the current context. Specifically, word-meaning access is guided by (i) distributional information about the a priori relative likelihoods of different word meanings and (ii) a wide range of contextual cues that indicate which meanings are most likely in the current context. Word Meaning Access 3 Words: The Gateway to MeaningThe mental lexicon contains stored knowledge about familiar words: information about their spoken and written forms, their meanings and their grammatical properties (see other chapters in this volume). A complete theoretical account of lexical processing must specify not only the nature of these different forms of stored, lexical knowledge, but must also describe the computational processes by which these different forms of knowledge interact. Here we focus on the process by which stored knowledge about a word's form (either orthographic or phonological) maps forward onto knowledge about its meaning.Wordforms are the gateway to meaning: once a reader (or listener) has identified the particular spoken or printed word that is present in their environment they are able to access a rich store of conceptual knowledge that may include perceptual, abstract and episodic features of the relevant concept. These individual word-sized units of stored knowledge can be combined together in a hierarchical manner within sentences to communicate complex, novel ideas.A common approach in models of lexical processing is to assume that the lexicon contains abstract representations of individual words. For example, in Morton's highly influential Logogen model (1969), any given logogen becomes activated by information (perceptual or contextual) that is consistent with the properties of that specific word. Once a single logogen's activation level rises to its threshold level, the properties of that word (including its meaning) becomes available to the comprehender. This idea that individual words are represented by abstract lexical units is retained in subsequent models such as the Cohort model of spoken word recognition (Marslen-Wilson & Welsh, 1978), the Interactive Activation and Competition model of visual word recognition (McClelland & Rumelhart, 1981), and the Dual Route Cascaded model of reading aloud (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001). Word Meaning Access 4Thus, according to these models, lexical representations provide an abstract level of lexical knowledge that bridges the gap between form-based (phonological...

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“…These effects have been studied using a word association task in which participants generate their responses to ambiguous words presented in isolation (e.g., "bark"), without a sentence context. Prior exposure to an ambiguous word which the sentence context disambiguated towards its subordinate meaning (e.g., "The tree had an unusual BARK ") tens of minutes earlier led to a considerable increase in responses associated with that subordinate meaning (Rodd et al, 2013). Such wordmeaning priming indicates that prior exposure modulates the availability of word meanings.…”

Section: Lexical Ambiguity Resolution In Language Comprehensionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To this end, the first three experiments used a word association task, which has been extensively used to study the factors that influence how ambiguous words are processed (e.g., Rodd et al, 2013Rodd et al, , 2016 since it allows participants to interpret isolated spoken words in an unconstrained manner while nonetheless requiring disambiguation. In the task, participants had to generate an associate of an ambiguous spoken word heard in a particular accent; these responses were then used to identify the retrieved meaning.…”

Section: Overview Of Experimentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition

Cai¹,

Gilbert²,

Davis³

et al. 2017

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Speech carries accent information relevant to determining the speaker's linguistic and social background. A series of web-based experiments demonstrate that accent cues can modulate access to word meaning. In Experiments 1-3, British participants were more likely to retrieve the American dominant meaning (e.g., hat meaning of "bonnet") in a word association task if they heard the words in an American than a British accent. In addition, results from a speeded semantic decision task (Experiment 4) and sentence comprehension task (Experiment 5) confirm that accent modulates on-line meaning retrieval such that comprehension of ambiguous words is easier when the relevant word meaning is dominant in the speaker's dialect. Critically, neutral-accent speech items, created by morphing British-and Americanaccented recordings, were interpreted in a similar way to accented words when embedded in a context of accented words (Experiment 2). This finding indicates that listeners do not use accent to guide meaning retrieval on a word-by-word basis; instead they use accent information to determine the dialectic identity of a speaker and then use their experience of that dialect to guide meaning access for all words spoken by that person. These results motivate a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition in which comprehenders determine key characteristics of their interlocutor and use this knowledge to guide word meaning access.

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Long-term priming of the meanings of ambiguous words

Cited by 77 publications

References 43 publications

How meaning similarity influences ambiguous word processing: the current state of the literature

How meaning similarity influences ambiguous word processing: the current state of the literature

Word meaning access: The one-to-many mapping from form to meaning

Accent modulates access to word meaning: Evidence for a speaker-model account of spoken word recognition

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