Processing ambiguous verbs: Evidence from eye movements.

Abstract

In 2 eye-tracking experiments, participants read verbs that had 2 (unrelated) meanings or 2 (related) senses in contexts that disambiguated before or after the verb, to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. A 3rd experiment used unambiguous verbs. The results indicated that the language processor used information about context in the early stages of resolving meaning ambiguities but only during integration for sense ambiguities. Effects of preference were delayed for both types of verbs. The results contrast with findings concerning the processing of nouns (e.g., K. Rayner & S. A. Duffy, 1986). For meaning ambiguities, the authors argue that delays in resolution allow both meanings to reach a high level of activation, thus reducing effects of frequency. For sense ambiguities, the authors argue that the processor does not access multiple senses but activates one underspecified meaning and uses context to home in on the appropriate sense.

Exhaustive semantic activation for reading ambiguous verbs in Chinese sentences

“…This finding suggested that the processor opts for the dominant meaning when it encounters a homonymous word but remains uncommitted to a particular meaning when it encounters a polysemous word. Pickering and Frisson (2001) found similar though delayed disambiguation patterns regarding the homonymy/polysemy distinction on English verbs. Regarding the effect of meaning relatedness, then, these findings suggested that the meanings of ambiguous words with higher ROMs are interconnected and tend to be co-activated.…”

“…The present research revisits this debate by considering an additional factor-the relatedness among an ambiguous word's meanings. As words with closely related meanings present different processing patterns than words with unrelated meanings (e.g., isolated word recognition: Azuma and Van Orden 1997;Rodd et al 2002;sentence comprehension: Frazier and Rayner 1990;Pickering and Frisson 2001), taking this additional factor into consideration offers us a clearer picture about the effect of context on lexical access.…”

“…Several studies provided evidence for the effect of ROM, reporting different reading patterns on homonymous and polysemous words in contextually biased sentences (Frazier and Rayner 1990;Pickering and Frisson 2001;Williams 1992;cf., Klein andMurphy 2001, 2002). In terms of the duration of semantic co-activation, while the meanings of a homonymous are co-activated only briefly at the initial stage of lexical access (e.g., Tanenhaus et al 1979), those of a polysemous word can remain active up to 850 milliseconds after the offset of the word (Williams 1992).…”

eDom: Norming software and relative meaning frequencies for 544 English homonyms

“…These data reveal that grammatical class is another important property to consider when using homonymous stimuli to study word and discourse comprehension, particularly with respect to nouns and verbs. It also opens the possibility that the different ambiguity effects that have been reported across grammatical classes are the result of a confound with relative meaning frequency (Frazier & Rayner, 1990;Frisson & Pickering, 1999;Pickering & Frisson, 2001), although Mirman et al (2010) observed different effects for noun-noun versus noun-verb homonyms, even when controlling for a measure of relative meaning frequency.…”

Trente ans de psycholinguistique

“…1989) et que la reconnaissance d'un mot est affectée par sa fréquence (Rayner et Duffy 1986). On a aussi utilisé le mouvement des yeux pour étudier la résolution de l'ambiguïté syntaxique (Frazier et Rayner 1982, 1987 et lexicale (Pickering et Frisson 2001). Ces derniers, par exemple, montrent que l'ambiguïté verbale ne donne pas lieu au même traitement que l'ambiguïté nominale : tandis que le nom ambigu reçoit une interprétation immédiate sur la base du contexte dans lequel il se trouve et de la fréquence des interprétations possibles, l'interprétation des verbes ambigus est tardive.…”