Completion and verification of ambiguous sentences

Olson, James N.; MacKay, Donald G.

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(74)80023-x

Cited by 24 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…This model has proven to be by far the most popular. It has been supported by research using a variety of experimental tasks, including sentence completion (Holmes, Arwas, & Garrett, 1977;MacKay, 1966;Olson & MacKay, 1974), recall following rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP; Holmes et al, 1977), phoneme monitoring (Cairns & Hsu, 1980;Cairns & Kamerman, 1975;Foss, 1970;Foss & Jenkins, 1973), lexical decision (Hoiley-Wilcox & Blank, 1980;Onifer & Swinney, 1981;Swinney, 1979), word naming (Seidenberg et al, 1982;Tanenhaus et al, 1979), and Stroop interference (Conrad, 1974;Oden & Spira, 1983).…”

Section: Exhaustive Access Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.

Simpson

1984

Psychological Bulletin

237

182

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This article reviews research concerned with processing words that have more than one meaning. Three principal models of ambiguity processing are outlined, and the research on which they are based is discussed. The findings seem best served by a hybrid model that allows for activation to accrue for all meanings, with the degree of activation sensitive to the frequency of the meanings and context. The major results of this field are interpreted in terms of the literature in word recognition. Such interpretation is important because of the guidance that such models may give to ambiguity research and because of the importance that ambiguous words hold for more general models of lexical access. Ambiguity is extremely common in natural language. A single sequence of words may yield more than one interpretation because of different possible relations among deep or surface structure elements or simply because one of the words has more than one meaning. This latter form-lexical ambiguity-has generated more research in the past decade than have the other types, not surprising considering the general preponderance of research at the lexical level of language processing (e.g., Becker, 1980;Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971). More than simply a by-product of the interest in lexical processing, however, word-level ambiguity may be viewed as a critical, special case of more general word recognition processes, capable of constraining lexical access models in important ways. There has been little attempt in the past, however, to integrate the lexical ambiguity research into more global models of word recognition.In particular, lexical ambiguity is relevant to the study of the role of context in lexical access, the process by which a presented word makes contact with its representation in longterm memory. Ambiguity normally goes unnoticed by a listener or reader, and it is assumed that the context allows the person I am grateful to Mark Ashcraft and four anonymous reviewers for their criticisms of earlier versions of this article and to Bill Easton for his help in its preparation.Requests for reprints should be sent to

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Section: Exhaustive Access Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.

Simpson

1984

Psychological Bulletin

237

182

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“…As was mentioned in the Introduction, the judgment task used in the present experiments has been used previously (e.g., Olson & MacKay, 1974) to measure the bias of ambiguous sentences. As such, the judgment task is a distinct improvement over the somewhat more common procedure of simply using the proportion of subjects who choose one interpretation vs. the other when given a forced choice.…”

Section: Determining the Bias Of Ambiguous Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, this task of judging the relative likelihoods of ambiguous sentence interpretations is sometimes used (e.g., Olson & MacKay, 1974) to tap subjects' linguistic intuitions about the degree of imbalance or bias of the ambiguous sentences. The bias of an ambiguous sentence is the degree to which one interpretation is more strongly preferred than the alternative.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…The bias of an ambiguous sentence is the degree to which one interpretation is more strongly preferred than the alternative. This variable has been repeatedly shown (e .g., Cairns, 1973: Holmes Arwas, & Garrett, 1977: MacKay, 1970: Olson & MacKay, 1974 to be very important for language processing. Therefore, it would be valuable to know if the bias of an ambiguous sentence is, in fact, determined by continuous semantic constraints governing its interpretations, and if so, exactly how bias relates to the sensibleness of the alternative interpretations.…”

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Semantic constraints and judged preference for interpretations of ambiguous sentences

Oden

1978

Memory & Cognition

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It is proposed that the degree of sensibleness of sentences is determined by semantic constraints which may be more or less satisfied. Such continuous semantic constraints were examined in two experiments in which subjects judged the likelihood of obtaining each of the interpretations of ambiguous sentences. The sentences were factorially generated by independently varying the degree to which semantic constraints for each interpretation were satisfied. In one experiment, the semantic constraints were manipulated by varying critical words within the ambiguous sentence; in the other experiment, a preceding context sentence was used. The results of both experiments supported the hypotheses that the judged likelihood was a direct function of the relative sensibleness of the interpretations, that semantic constraints determined the degree of sensibleness of each interpretation, and that these semantic constraints are continuous restrictions which are independent of each other and stable from sentence to sentence in which they occur.

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“…The difference is presumed to reflect the increased computational load resulting from checking both senses against contextual information. Most other studies on lexical ambiguity have used tasks which do not reveal how the initial assignment of meaning to an ambiguous item occurs, since they require a variety of decisions to be made following comprehension of the sentence (Bever, Garrett, & Hurtig, 1973;Cairns, 1973;Carey, Mehler, & Bever, 1970;Foss, Bever, & Silver, 1968;MacKay, 1966;Olson & MacKay, 1974).…”

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Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences

1977

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The perceptual complexity of lexically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences was compared in three experiments. In Experiment 1, the report of ambiguous words from rapidly presented ambiguous sentences was worse than the report of corresponding unambiguous words from unambiguous sentences. Results of Experiment 2 showed that the effect was not reduced by the presence of prior biasing context within the sentence. Experiment 3 repeated the finding with a sentence meaning classification task. It was concluded that both meanings of a lexically ambiguous sentence must be computed, even when prior context makes one meaning more plausible than the other.An important factor in the process of comprehending a sentence is the determination of the appropriate meaning of the lexical items. It is usual for a lexical item not only to have multiple grammatical functions, but also to have more than one sense or meaning. Most lexical items have many senses, varying in the degree of semantic relatedness. Clearly, then, rapid selection has to be made between the possible senses of ambiguous words during sentence comprehension, the sense selected being the one that fits in best with the context in which the word occurs. It may be that contextual cues guide the choice of the most plausible sense without any alternative senses being considered, so that no extra processing time is required by the presence of the ambiguous item. On the other hand, it is possible that more than one sense must always be accessed and tested against the context, thereby resulting in additional processing time. It was the intention of the present experiments to try to decide between these two hypotheses.Evidence that the presence of a lexically ambiguous item in a sentence does increase perceptual complexity comes primarily from experiments using the phonememonitor task. Foss (1970), Foss and Jenkins (1973), and Cairns and Kamerman (1975 have shown that reaction times to detect a specified phoneme are longer immediately after ambiguous words than after corresponding unambiguous words. The difference is presumed This research was partly supported by a grant from the A ustralian Research Grants Committee to the lust author. The authors wish to thank Julia Vitale for her assistance in constructing the sentences 'for the lust experiment and Katie Kirby for making up the anomalous items in the last experimen t. Requests for reprints should be addressed to

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Completion and verification of ambiguous sentences

Cited by 24 publications

References 11 publications

Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.

Lexical ambiguity and its role in models of word recognition.

Semantic constraints and judged preference for interpretations of ambiguous sentences

Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences

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