Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning dominance

Abstract

Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 & 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning.

What words mean and express: semantics and pragmatics of kind terms and verbs

“…These are all productive and regular patterns, and most of them can be found in many languages of the world (Srinivasan and Rabagliati, 2015). One typical way of dealing with these cases is by postulating different representations stored either in two separate lexical entries or within a single lexical entry (sense-enumeration lexicons) (Foraker and Murphy, 2012); another is to postulate a core common meaning (Klepousniotou, et al, 2008, Frisson, 2009; and yet another is to posit richer conceptual representations (Pustejovsky, 1995).…”

“…Theorists such as Klepousniotou and Frisson have applied this idea to the study of polysemy, such that, according to them, there are abstract or schematic meanings which can cover all the senses of a polysemous expression. Yet, as Foraker and Murphy (2012), claim, it is really difficult to find anything in common between the building and the institution sense of 'school'. That is, it is doubtful that some schematic meaning could apply to the different senses of these regular polysemes.…”

The Big Concepts Paper: A Defence of Hybridism

“…Once a meaning is selected, access to the other meaning is blocked. It is plausible to think that there is no sharp distinction between homonymy and polysemy: some polysemes behave as homonyms (see Foraker and Murphy [2012]). It seems that the more related the senses, the more facilitating effects we find.…”

“…Their idea is that the senses of a polyseme typically overlap, which explains why we are more able to keep all of them in mind, and so why they facilitate each other and why words with many senses are easier to process. Foraker and Murphy ([2012]) (rightly) dispute this approach: it is not the case that 'rabbit' retains the four features above in its two senses. In the animal-sense, the case of a running rabbit, the rabbit is not edible, and it is not meat.…”

The Organization of the Senses of Polysemy in Japanese EFL Learners’ Mental Lexicon

“…On the other hand, polysemous words have multiple meanings which have semantic relationships with each other (e.g., have has several meanings such as "to own," "to experience," "to eat"). Since homonymy and polysemy have different characteristics, some researchers use the word "sense" to refer to the meanings of polysemy, but not "meaning" (e.g., Foraker & Murphy, 2012). In this paper, we use "sense" to indicate the meaning of a polysemous word in order to avoid confusion.…”