The impact of recent and long-term experience on access to word meanings: Evidence from large-scale internet-based experiments

Abstract

Many word forms map onto multiple meanings (e.g., ‘‘ace”). The current experiments explore the extent to which adults reshape the lexical–semantic representations of such words on the basis of experience, to increase the availability of more recently accessed meanings. A naturalistic web-based experiment in which primes were presented within a radio programme (Experiment 1; N = 1800) and a lab-based experiment (Experiment 2) show that when listeners have encountered one or two disambiguated instances of an ambiguous word, they then retrieve this primed meaning more often (compared with an unprimed control condition). This word-meaning priming lasts up to 40 min after exposure, but decays very rapidly during this interval. Experiments 3 and 4 explore longer term word-meaning priming by measuring the impact of more extended, naturalistic encounters with ambiguous words: recreational rowers (N = 213) retrieved rowing related meanings for words (e.g., ‘‘feather”) more often if they had rowed that day, despite a median delay of 8 hours. The rate of rowing-related interpretations also increased with additional years’ rowing experience. Taken together these experiments show that individuals’ overall meaning preferences reflect experience across a wide range of timescales from minutes to years. In addition, priming was not reduced by a change in speaker identity (Experiment 1), suggesting that the phenomenon occurs at a relatively abstract lexical–semantic level. The impact of experience was reduced for older adults (Experiments 1, 3, 4) suggesting that the lexical–semantic representations of younger listeners may be more malleable to current linguistic experience

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

“…More recently however, researchers have attempted to further develop this approach to explore in more detail how the availability of word meanings is influenced by individuals' idiosyncratic experiences with particular word meanings. Rodd et al (2016) investigated word meaning preferences in recreational rowers whose language experience differs somewhat from the rest of the population because they regularly encounter rowing-related terminology: they will frequently encounter rowing-specific meanings for highly familiar words such as "catch", "square" and "feather", which refer (for example) to a particular position of the oar or phase of the rowing stroke. Rodd et al, (2016) found that the relative availability of these rowing-specific meanings (compared with the non-rowing, dominant meaning) increased in a logarithmic manner with participants' number years of rowing experience: the availability of word meanings increase (2016) showed that (compared with non-experts) individuals with specific expertise in baseball showed significantly more difficulty processing words that had a baseball-related meaning (e.g., "bat") when these words were presented in sentence contexts that were strongly biased towards the non-baseball meaning (e.g.…”

“…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.…”

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

“…In follow-up work Rodd et al (2016) showed that repeated and extensive exposure to specific meanings (e.g., in the context of individuals' hobbies) leads to substantial inter-individual differences in word association responses that reflect underlying differences in their experiences with these words both within the current day and over several years. Poort, Warren, and Rodd (2016) have shown that the effect of prior meaning exposure also occurs across languages, for example when a written word like "room" exists both in English and in Dutch but with different meanings.…”

“…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.…”

Relative Meaning Frequencies for 100 Homonyms: British eDom Norms

“…There was no indication that participants' ratings differed from those of the group depending on age, employment, geographical location, and other characteristics. Instead, the inter-rater variation in meaning-dominance norms appears to reflect inherent and unsystematic differences in native speakers' linguistic environment and their actual experience with the meanings of ambiguous words [17].…”