Abstract:Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension-based measures suggest that polysemes' senses (e.g., paper as in printer paper or term paper) share lexical representations, whereas homophones' meanings (e.g., pen as in ballpoint pen or pig pen) correspond to distinct lexical representations. Less is known about the lexical representations of polysemes compared to homophones in language production. In this study, speakers named pictures after reading sentence fragments that primed polysem… Show more
“…Indeed, senses prime each other no matter which sense is more frequent, and their common activation survives for at least 750 ms (MacGregor et al, 2015). These observations, together with the further observation that words with multiple senses are recognized faster (in lexical decision tasks) than words with less senses and, especially, than homonyms (Azuma and van Orden, 1997), suggests that the representation and storage of polysemous senses is very different from the representation and storage of homonym meanings (see also similar results concerning production reported in Li and Slevc, 2016). As it is customary to think that homonymous meanings are stored in different lexical representations, the model of polysemy representation and storage has to be different from the sense enumeration lexicon some advocated in the past (Katz, 1972) 3 .…”
There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning.
“…Indeed, senses prime each other no matter which sense is more frequent, and their common activation survives for at least 750 ms (MacGregor et al, 2015). These observations, together with the further observation that words with multiple senses are recognized faster (in lexical decision tasks) than words with less senses and, especially, than homonyms (Azuma and van Orden, 1997), suggests that the representation and storage of polysemous senses is very different from the representation and storage of homonym meanings (see also similar results concerning production reported in Li and Slevc, 2016). As it is customary to think that homonymous meanings are stored in different lexical representations, the model of polysemy representation and storage has to be different from the sense enumeration lexicon some advocated in the past (Katz, 1972) 3 .…”
There is an ongoing debate about the meaning of lexical words, i.e., words that contribute with content to the meaning of sentences. This debate has coincided with a renewal in the study of polysemy, which has taken place in the psycholinguistics camp mainly. There is already a fruitful interbreeding between two lines of research: the theoretical study of lexical word meaning, on the one hand, and the models of polysemy psycholinguists present, on the other. In this paper I aim at deepening on this ongoing interbreeding, examine what is said about polysemy, particularly in the psycholinguistics literature, and then show how what we seem to know about the representation and storage of polysemous senses affects the models that we have about lexical word meaning.
“…I take Leon Li and Robert Slevc to be getting at something like this problem:Given that the comprehension of a word as it appears in any sense entails a simultaneous activation of the word's other, semantically unrelated senses, it may be in principle not possible to discern, using comprehension‐based measures, whether a word's multiple senses are truly unified in representation, or whether the word's multiple senses are separate but consistently co‐activated 11 . (Li & Slevc, 2016, p. 4)There is no such problem in speakers because there is no analogue of the hearers' mind‐reading processes of disambiguation: The concept a speaker is intentionally expressing selects E meaning M2 from the lexicon and thereby disambiguates E. The contrast between that “simple” convention‐exploiting process and a speaker's partly mind‐reading one that involves an expectation about the hearer ' s mind reading should be stark. Yet, as Li and Slevc (2016) remark, “most cognitive research on polysemes has focused on comprehension, so little is known about the representations of polysemous words in the production system” (p. 4).…”
Section: Prediction: Not Much Help From Psycholinguisticsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…(Li & Slevc, 2016, p. 4)There is no such problem in speakers because there is no analogue of the hearers' mind‐reading processes of disambiguation: The concept a speaker is intentionally expressing selects E meaning M2 from the lexicon and thereby disambiguates E. The contrast between that “simple” convention‐exploiting process and a speaker's partly mind‐reading one that involves an expectation about the hearer ' s mind reading should be stark. Yet, as Li and Slevc (2016) remark, “most cognitive research on polysemes has focused on comprehension, so little is known about the representations of polysemous words in the production system” (p. 4). They themselves focus on production but cite no examples of any previous researchers doing so.…”
Section: Prediction: Not Much Help From Psycholinguisticsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Given that the comprehension of a word as it appears in any sense entails a simultaneous activation of the word's other, semantically unrelated senses, it may be in principle not possible to discern, using comprehension‐based measures, whether a word's multiple senses are truly unified in representation, or whether the word's multiple senses are separate but consistently co‐activated 11 . (Li & Slevc, 2016, p. 4)…”
Section: Prediction: Not Much Help From Psycholinguisticsmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…(MacGregor, Bouwsema & Klepousniotou, 2015, pp. 126–127)Perhaps polysemes are stored as “unified lexical representations” (Li & Slevc, 2016, p. 1).…”
The paper urges that polysemous phenomena are typically semantic not pragmatic. The part of a message sent by a polysemous expression is typically one of its meanings encoded in the speaker's language and not the result of pragmatic modification. The hearer receives that part of the message by a process of disambiguation, by detecting which item in the lexicon the speaker has selected. This is the best explanation of observed regularities. The paper argues that the experimental evidence from psycholinguistics, particularly that produced in discussions of “underspecification” and “overspecification,” does not undermine this view nor support the pragmatic alternative.
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