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For many models oflexical ambiguity resolution, relative frequency of the different meanings of homographs (words with more than one meaning) is crucial. Although several homograph association norms have been published in the past, none has involved a large number of subjects responding to a large number of homographs, and most homograph norming studies are now at least a decade old. In Experiment 1, associations to 566 homographs were collected from an average of 192 subjects per homograph. Frequency of occurrence for the three most common meanings is reported, along with the corresponding associates, and a measure of the overall ambiguity of each homograph. Homographs whose meanings differed in part of speech were more ambiguous overall than homographs whose different meanings belonged to a single grammatical class. Homographs whose pronunciation depended on meaning (heterophones) were no more ambiguous than nonheterophones, and word frequency was unrelated to overall ambiguity. Estimates of homograph balance across different norming studies were compared, and homographs with two meanings of approximately equal relative meaning frequency (balanced homographs) and homographs with one clearly dominant meaning (polarized homographs) were identified. In Experiment 2, reliability of meaning categorizations was measured for a subset of the homographs in the first experiment. Meaning categorizations were shown to be highly reliable across raters.Homographs are words that have more than one meaning but share the same orthography. They most often also share phonology (e.g., a dog's bark vs. a tree's bark; a fireplace poker vs. a poker game), but a few English homographs have distinct phonologies for their different meanings. For these heterophonic homographs, pronunciation depends on meaning; examples are "bass" (fish vs. guitar) and "wind" (gale vs. to coil). Contrary to intuition, homographs are not an obscure class of linguistic items. Rather, homographs could be considered important topics of study solely because of their abundance in English. Britton (1978) found that 44 % of a random sample of English words had more than one meaning, and that 85 % of a sample of high-frequency English words had more than one meaning. Several authors have argued that meaning indeterminacy in language and the environment in general is widespread and is one of the pervasive problems of human information processing (e.g

The distinctionbetween the premovement planning of an action and its on-line control has a long history (e.g., Jeannerod, 1988;Keele & Posner, 1968;Woodworth, 1899). Here, we demonstrate that the earlier portions of a grasping movement are more affected by the Ebbinghaus illusion than are the latter portions. These results provide further support for a planning/control model (Glover, 2001;Glover & Dixon, 2001a, 2001b, 2001d in which planning is more susceptible to illusions than control. The results do not support a perception/action model (e.g., Aglioti, DeSouza, & Goodale, 1995;Bridgeman, 1999;Bridgeman, Peery, & Anand, 1997;Goodale & Milner, 1992;Milner & Goodale, 1995), in which both planning and control are thought to be less susceptible to illusions than are perceptions.Woodworth (1899) was the first to demonstrate the distinctionbetween the premovement planning and the on-line control of action. Woodworth found that when participants were asked to draw lines of particular lengths, they required sufficient time to correct the actions on line. For example, accuracy was worse at a drawing rate of 400 msec per line than at slower rates. Furthermore, if the linedrawing task was done without vision, participants' performance at all speeds was just as poor as when the task was done quickly with vision. Woodworth reasoned from this that actions were composed of two stages: an "initial impulse" stage that reflected the premovement planning of the action and a subsequent "current control" stage that reflected the on-line correction of an action via feedback mechanisms.Since Woodworth's (1899) seminal study, much research has gone into characterizingthese two stages of action (e.g., Abrams & Pratt, 1993;Elliot, Binsted, & Heath, 1999;Flash & Henis, 1991;Keele & Posner, 1968;Khan, Franks, & Goodman, 1998;Meyer, Abrams, Kornblum, Wright, & Smith, 1988;Pratt & Abrams, 1996), and some distinctions between the two stages have been elucidated. For example, planning appears to be a relatively slow and deliberate process. The minimum time required to initiatea movement has been found to be around 250 msec (Stark, 1968). Conversely, on-line control appears to operate relatively quickly. In contrast to the 400-msec lag between planning and control stages hypothesized by Woodworth on the basis of his original study, the benefits of visual and proprioceptive feedback during on-line control have more recently been found to occur in as little as 70-150 msec (e.g., Evarts & Vaughn, 1978;Lee & Tatton, 1975;Smeets, Erkelens, & van der Gon, 1990;Zelaznik, Hawkins, & Kisselburgh, 1983).We have hypothesized that another difference between planning and control may be how each is affected by context-induced visual illusions. In the planning/control model (Glover, 2001;Glover & Dixon, 2001a, 2001b, 2001d, context-induced illusions affect the planning process, but not the on-line control process. We use the term context-inducedto refer to distortions that arise owing to the visual context surrounding the target, as opposed to those that re...

Action affordances can be activated by non-target objects in the visual field as well as by word labels attached to target objects. These activations have been manifested in interference effects of distractors and words on actions. We examined whether affordances could be activated implicitly by words representing graspable objects that were either large (e.g., APPLE) or small (e.g., GRAPE) relative to the target. Subjects first read a word and then grasped a wooden block. Interference effects of the words arose in the early portions of the grasping movements. Specifically, early in the movement, reading a word representing a large object led to a larger grip aperture than reading a word representing a small object. This difference diminished as the hand approached the target, suggesting on-line correction of the semantic effect. The semantic effect and its on-line correction are discussed in the context of ecological theories of visual perception, the distinction between movement planning and control, and the proximity of language and motor planning systems in the human brain.

Empirical studies in psychology typically employ null hypothesis significance testing to draw statistical inferences. We propose that likelihood ratios are a more straightforward alternative to this approach. Likelihood ratios provide a measure of the fit of two competing models; the statistic represents a direct comparison of the relative likelihood of the data, given the best fit of the two models. Likelihood ratios offer an intuitive, easily interpretable statistic that allows the researcher great flexibility in framing empirical arguments. In support of this position, we report the results of a survey of empirical articles in psychology, in which the common uses of statistics by empirical psychologists is examined. From the results of this survey, we show that likelihood ratios are able to serve all the important statistical needs of researchers in empirical psychology in a format that is more straightforward and easier to interpret than traditional inferential statistics.