Semantic ambiguity norms for 530 Spanish words

Abstract

This study presents semantic ambiguity norms for 530 Spanish words. Two subjective measures of semantic ambiguity and two subjective measures of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings were collected. In addition, two objective measures of semantic ambiguity were included. Furthermore, subjective ratings were obtained for some relevant lexicosemantic variables, such as concreteness, familiarity, emotional valence, arousal, and age of acquisition. In sum, the database overcomes some of the limitations of the published databases of Spanish ambiguous words; in particular, the scarcity of measures of ambiguity, the lack of relatedness of ambiguous word meanings measures, and the absence of a set of unambiguous words. Thus, it will be very helpful for researchers interested in exploring semantic ambiguity as well as for those using semantic ambiguous words to study language processing in clinical populations.

HEROÍNA: Drug or hero? Meaning-dependent valence norms for ambiguous Spanish words

“…Participants A total of 634 Spanish native undergraduate students (M = 21.00 years; SD = 4.25; 487 women) from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV, Tarragona, Spain) and the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain) participated in the study. They were obtained mostly from the same population as the participants of Haro et al (2017). Participants were recruited using convenience-volunteer sampling.…”

“…The database was developed following a series of steps. First, a pool of potential Spanish ambiguous words were identified by consulting previous studies (Armstrong, Tokowicz, & Plaut, 2012;Armstrong, Zugarramurdi, Cabana, Lisboa, & Plaut, 2016;Clifton, 2015;Gawlick-Grendell & Woltz, 1994;Gorfein, Viviani, & Leddo, 1982;Haro et al, 2017). Second, only ambiguous words that seemed to have two different meanings were selected, relying on definitions drawn from the electronic version of the Diccionario de la Lengua Española (Real Academia Española, 2014; http://dle.rae.es/).…”

“…Furthermore, in order to facilitate the comparison of ambiguous and unambiguous words in future research, we included an equal number of unambiguous words in the database. To that end, we initially incorporated 136 unambiguous words from the database of Haro et al (2017) and 150 potentially unambiguous words identified from the whole corpus of the emoFinder online search engine (Fraga, Guasch, Haro, Padrón, & Ferré, 2018). After NOM ratings were collected, 34 unambiguous words were discarded in order to have the same number of unambiguous and ambiguous words in the data set (i.e., 252).…”

“…In order to decide whether a word is ambiguous or not, as well as what kind of ambiguity it carries (i.e., ambiguity between unrelated [homonymy] or related meanings [polysemy]), first we need to estimate the number of meanings (NOM) that it has and, in case there is more than one meaning, the relatedness of meanings (ROM). Although there are several different methods to do so, all have some weaknesses and limitations (see Haro, Ferré, Boada, & Demestre, 2017). In brief, there are two main approaches to estimate NOM and ROM.…”

“…To that end, we collected valence ratings for the words presented in isolation (i.e., non-disambiguated) and included information about several relevant ambiguity variables. It should be noted that a large number of words and ambiguity measures of the present database come from the study of Haro et al (2017), which provides both subjective and objective ambiguity measures for a sample of 530 ambiguous and unambiguous words. The study includes two subjective NOM measures: NOM ratings obtained by asking participants to choose the appropriate number of meanings for a word using a numerical scale (0 = no meaning, 1 = one meaning, 2 = more than one meaning), and an ambiguous/unambiguous categorization made by a group of judges on the basis of the word associates generated by participants.…”