Listeners and readers generalize their experience with word meanings across modalities.

Abstract

Research has shown that adults’ lexical-semantic representations are surprisingly malleable. For instance, the interpretation of ambiguous words (e.g., bark) is influenced by experience such that recently encountered meanings become more readily available (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013). However, the mechanism underlying this word-meaning priming effect remains unclear, and competing accounts make different predictions about the extent to which information about word meanings that is gained within one modality (e.g., speech) is transferred to the other modality (e.g., reading) to aid comprehension. In two Web-based experiments, ambiguous target words were primed with either written or spoken sentences that biased their interpretation toward a subordinate meaning, or were unprimed. About 20 min after the prime exposure, interpretation of these target words was tested by presenting them in either written or spoken form, using word association (Experiment 1, N = 78) and speeded semantic relatedness decisions (Experiment 2, N = 181). Both experiments replicated the auditory unimodal priming effect shown previously (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013) and revealed significant cross-modal priming: primed meanings were retrieved more frequently and swiftly across all primed conditions compared with the unprimed baseline. Furthermore, there were no reliable differences in priming levels between unimodal and cross-modal prime-test conditions. These results indicate that recent experience with ambiguous word meanings can bias the reader’s or listener’s later interpretation of these words in a modality-general way. We identify possible loci of this effect within the context of models of long-term priming and ambiguity resolution.

Settling Into Semantic Space: An Ambiguity-Focused Account of Word-Meaning Access

“…However recent evidence suggests that similar mechanisms may support learning about word meanings. Gaskell et al, (2018) found that the magnitude of word-meaning priming seen after 12 or 24 hours is significantly boosted when the learning takes place immediately before a period of sleep. This suggests that the short-term boost in word meaning availability that is seen at intervals of 20-40 minutes (e.g., Rodd et al, 2016) may not reflect a long-term resilient change to the stored mental lexicon, and that it is only with sleep that the knowledge acquired about word-meaning availability is integrated into the lexicon.…”

“…They also have revealed several important characteristics of the underlying mechanism(s) that supports this learning. Gilbert et al, (2018) examined the extent to which information about word meanings that is gained within one modality (e.g., speech) is transferred to the other modality (e.g., reading). In these experiments ambiguous target words were primed with either written or spoken sentence.…”

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

“…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").…”

“…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.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Towards a distributed connectionist account of cognates and interlingual homographs: evidence from semantic relatedness tasks (v0.1)"

“…First, given the surprising lack of a cognate facilitation effect in Experiment 1, to conduct a direct replication of the pattern of results observed in the bilingual group of Experiment 1. And second, given the successful use of a semantic relatedness task in the monolingual domain to replicate effects of long-term priming with homonyms (Gilbert et al, 2018), to attempt once again to replicate the cross-lingual long-term priming effect demonstrated by Poort et al (2016).…”