Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access

Abstract

There have been several reports in the literature of faster visual lexical decisions to words that are semantically ambiguous. All current models of this ambiguity advantage assume that it is the presence of multiple unrelated meanings that produce this benefit. A set of three lexical decision experiments reported here challenge this assumption. We contrast the ambiguity seen in words like bark, which have multiple unrelated meanings, with words that have multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). In all three experiments we find that while multiple word senses do produce faster responses, ambiguity between multiple meanings delays recognition. These results suggest that, while competition between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words delays their recognition, the rich semantic representations associated with words with many senses facilitate their recognition. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA) Key Words: lexical ambiguity; polysemy; distributed semantic representations.Many words are semantically ambiguous, and can refer to more than one concept. For example, bark can refer either to a part of a tree or to the sound made by a dog. To understand such words, we must select one of these different interpretations, normally on the basis of the context in which the word occurs.Words can be ambiguous in different ways; a word like bark has two semantically unrelated meanings, which seem to share the same written and spoken form purely by chance. More common than this type of accidental ambiguity is the systematic ambiguity between related word senses. For example, the word twist has a range of dictionary definitions including to make into a coil or spiral, to operate by turning, to alter the shape of, to misconstrue the meaning of, to wrench or sprain, and to squirm or writhe. The meaning of this word varies systematically according to the context in which the word is used; for example, there are important differences between what it means to twist an ankle compared with to twist the truth. However, although the meaning of the word is ambiguous between these different interpretations, the interpretations are closely related to each other both etymologically and semantically; this is quite unlike the ambiguity for a word like bark.

A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming

“…This result suggests that a character with multiple meanings is processed more efficiently, which is congruent with previous naming (Woollams, 2005) and lexical decision (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002) studies.…”

Semantic Ambiguity and the Process of Generating Meaning From Print.

“…The ambiguity advantage in this LDT is consistent with that reported in Experiment 1 and in many previous studies. The null effect of relatedness is consistent with results reported by Hino et al (2004) and with the claims of Murphy (2001, 2002) but is not consistent with previous reports of a relatedness advantage in LDTs by Azuma and Van Orden (1997) and Rodd et al (2002). We addressed possible reasons for the discrepancy with Azuma and Van Orden's results and also with Rodd et al's results in the Hino et al (2004) article.…”

Lexical selection in bilingual speech production does not involve language suppression.

“…Not surprisingly, this analysis revealed that switch trials were reliably slower than nonswitch trials, F 1 (1, 30) ϭ 134.18, p Ͻ .01; F 2 (1, 18) ϭ 257.27, p Ͻ .01; and color-naming trials were significantly slower than 5 In a recent article, Finkbeiner, Forster, Nicol, and Nakamura (2004) have suggested that L1 words have more senses than L2 words. See also Finkbeiner (2003) and Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen-Wilson (2002), who have found that many-sense words are responded to faster than few-sense words. Sense counts were taken from Wordnet (Fellbaum, 1998) Figure 6.…”