On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

Abstract

Most research supports a non-selective (or exhaustive) account of activation whereby multiple meanings of a word are initially activated (Degani and Tokowicz Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1266-1303, 2010. But what happens to the non-selected meaning of an ambiguous word (e.g., bark) and how is the decision made to select one meaning over the other? A great deal of research by Gernsbacher and colleagues (e.g., Gernsbacher and Faust 1991a) suggests that the nonselected meaning is "discarded" via active suppression. The present paper examines meaning-selection in ambiguous words using a word to elicit meaning context (rather than a sentence). Additionally, a manipulation of cognitive load (Experiment 2) was employed to examine these processes. Results support a suppression account of meaning selection. An updated conceptualization of ambiguity resolution is proposed.Humans use language in numerous ways and through multiple modalities with impressive efficiency. Sometimes, linguistic interactions are clear and result in effective communication, as intended by Grice (1975). Other times linguistic stimuli can be ambiguous. For example, in the absence of context, a word like bark might activate one of two very different concepts (related to either tree or dog). How is this type of ambiguity resolved? This question has prompted the present investigations.Although a large body of research already exists clarifying some aspects of the ambiguity resolution process, a much smaller body of research exists to explain how various cognitive contexts affect this process. There is empirical evidence of a small number of cognitive factors (such as reading ability (Gernsbacher and Robertson 1995)) affecting the ambiguity resolution process.Curr Psychol