Priming dominant and unusual senses of ambiguous words

Yates, Jack

doi:10.3758/bf03198254

Cited by 41 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…One popular method for estimating dominance is via the classification of the free associates generated for a given homonym on the basis of the meaning of the word to which they are related (Geis & Winograd, 1974;Gilhooly & Logie, 1980a, 1980bGorfein, Viviani, & Leddo, 1982;Kausler & Kollasch, 1970;Mirman et al, 2010;Nelson, McEvoy, Walling, & Wheeler, 1980;Twilley et al, 1994), which is related to similar methods of classifying generated definitions (Warren, Bresnick, & Green, 1977), generated sentences (Wollen, Cox, Coahran, Shea, & Kirby, 1980), or sentence completions (Yates, 1978). These methods involve two steps: (1) Participants are provided with an ambiguous word (e.g., BANK) and generate an associate (or other similar response; e.g., MONEY), and (2) a separate group of raters classify these responses on the basis of their intuitions regarding the meanings to which these associates are related (e.g., the <financial> vs. < edge of a river> meanings of BANK).…”

Section: Issues With Existing Norming Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

eDom: Norming software and relative meaning frequencies for 544 English homonyms

2012

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Words that are homonyms-that is, for which a single written and spoken form is associated with multiple, unrelated interpretations, such as COMPOUND, which can denote an or a meaning-are an invaluable class of items for studying word and discourse comprehension. When using homonyms as stimuli, it is critical to control for the relative frequencies of each interpretation, because this variable can drastically alter the empirical effects of homonymy. Currently, the standard method for estimating these frequencies is based on the classification of free associates generated for a homonym, but this approach is both assumption-laden and resourcedemanding. Here, we outline an alternative norming methodology based on explicit ratings of the relative meaning frequencies of dictionary definitions. To evaluate this method, we collected and analyzed data in a norming study involving 544 English homonyms, using the eDom norming software that we developed for this purpose. Dictionary definitions were generally sufficient to exhaustively cover word meanings, and the methods converged on stable norms with fewer data and less effort on the part of the experimenter. The predictive validity of the norms was demonstrated in analyses of lexical decision data from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al., Behavior Research Methods, 39, 445-459, 2007), and from Armstrong and Plaut (Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, [2223][2224][2225][2226][2227][2228] 2011). On the basis of these results, our norming method obviates relying on the unsubstantiated assumptions involved in estimating relative meaning frequencies on the basis of classification of free associates. Additional details of the norming procedure, the meaning frequency norms, and the source code, standalone binaries, and user manual for the software are available at http:// edom.cnbc.cmu.edu.Keywords Semantic ambiguity . Homonyms . Relative meaning frequency . Norming methods . Rating dictionary definitions . Free associate classification . Homonymy disadvantageThe vast majority of words in English and many other languages are semantically ambiguous-that is, they are associated with multiple distinct interpretations. For example, the word COMPOUND can denote either an or a meaning, depending on the context (hereafter denoted as / COMPOUND; Britton, 1978;Klein & Murphy, 2001). As a result, developing an account of semantic ambiguity resolution is a critical component of any theory of word and discourse comprehension, and this has been a key objective in a considerable body of research over the past several decades (e.g

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Section: Issues With Existing Norming Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

eDom: Norming software and relative meaning frequencies for 544 English homonyms

2012

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“…The subjects' attention is misdirected on some trials in one of two ways: Either (1) the cue is unrelated to either word in the subsequent pair or (2) the cue is a homograph and the subsequent word pair employs the infrequent sense of the homograph. Concerning the latter condition, Yates (1978) found facilitation on such trials at long SOAs; however, he did not investigate short SOAs and his baseline was trials employing an unrelated cue rather than a neutral cue. We employ a neutral cue baseline and include both a short and long SOA.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…They either have not involved miscuing (Ashcraft, 1976;Collins & Quillian, 1970;Homa & Silver, 1976;Loftus & Loftus, 1974) or have used only a long SOA (Yates, 1978). The primary purpose of the present research is to examine the possibility of rapidly developing priming inhibition by studying performance in a semantic task under conditions in which attention is occasionally misdirected at short SOAs.…”

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confidence: 99%

Interference and facilitation effects of primes upon verification processes

Myers

Lorch

1980

Memory & Cognition

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Priming effects on sentence verification were investigated. The semantic relation of the prime and the probe, and the interval between prime and probe presentation (SOA), were varied for both ambiguous and unambiguous sentences. Reaction time to decide that a sentence was true or false was longer if the preceding prime was a word that was unrelated to the probe than if the prime was the word "blank." In contradiction of Posner and Snyder's (1975) claim that conscious processes develop slowly, this result was found at SOAs as short as 250 msec. Verification performance was facilitated for both sentence types when the prime word was the first of the to-bepresented probe sentence, but the magnitude of the facilitation effects depended upon the truth value of the probe, the associative strength of the subject and predicate of the probe sentence, and upon SOA. These findings indicate that priming affects the processing of relations among concepts in semantic memory, as well as the encoding of the probe.The processing of an input by our perceptual and memory systems has immediate consequences for succeeding inputs to those information processing systems. The manner in which some initial "priming" stimulus affects a response to a subsequent stimulus depends upon how the successive inputs are related on perceptual and semantic dimensions. Priming effects do not depend solely upon the relation between the long-term representations of the prime and probe stimulus, however. The direction and magnitude of priming effects also depend upon the validity of the prime as a predictor of the probe stimulus and upon the length of the interval between presentation of the prime and presentation of the probe. Under what conditions does a prime facilitate or interfere with retrieval of information from memory? What is the role of the time interval between prime and probe presentation? How do priming effects depend upon the nature of the probe and its relation to the prime? Using a semantic verification task, we have addressed such questions in the experiments reported in this paper.Most of the previous research on priming has employed a lexical decision task which requires the subject to determine whether a letter string is a word. The interesting result in this task is that subjects detect a word faster when it has been preceded by a semantically related word than when it has been preceded by an unrelated word or by a neutral stimulus (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). This facilitation effect has generally

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“…Word associates were obtained from standardized lists of word association norms (e.g., Gilhooly & Logie, 1980;Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998;Nelson, McEvoy, Walling, & Wheeler, 1980;Twilley, Dixon, Taylor, & Clark, 1994;Yates, 1978). Target In particular, word associates to the dominant meaning had a mean frequency of 30.5 (range: 1-115), word associates to the subordinate meaning had a mean frequency of 30 (range: 1-141), and unrelated control words had a mean frequency of 29.5 (range: 1-112).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Unbalanced homonymous words were chosen from standardized lists of ambiguous words (e.g., Gilhooly & Logie, 1980;Nelson, McEvoy, Walling, & Wheeler, 1980;Twilley, Dixon, Taylor, & Clark, 1994;Yates, 1978). The frequency of occurrence of the dominant meaning was never less than 63%, and the frequency of occurrence of the subordinate meaning was never greater than 32%.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%