The activation—selection model of meaning: Explaining why the son comes out after the sun

Abstract

1986Prior to the late 1980s, research on the semantic ambiguity of single words had focused on the process of lexical access. Although various researchers favored different forms of access (exhaustive, context-dependent, ordered; see Simpson, 1984, for a review), the common tendency was to treat each occurrence of an ambiguous word as an independent event. A more recent trend in the ambiguity processing literature has been to examine the effect of the repetition of an ambiguous word in situations in which the appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word varies across occurrences. Changing the contextually appropriate meaning of a homograph across trials in a task can result in large decrements in performance, such as when an individual is required to decide if seal is related to walrus after earlier deciding that seal is related to glue. Maintaining the same meaning context generally facilitates performance, for example, deciding that seal is related to walrus shows a benefit if earlier the participant had decided that seal is related to dolphin (for reviews of this literature see Gorfein, 2001a;Simpson & Kang, 1994). Although Simpson and Kang (1994) have argued that in normal discourse, words are often repeated and therefore the long-term effects of processing each occurrence of an ambiguous word need to be understood, surprisingly little theoretical work has addressed the issue.Simpson and Kellas (1989) reported that once a homograph had been used as a prime for a word related to one of its less common meanings (e.g., bank as a prime for river), a target word related to the dominant meaning of the homograph (e.g., bank followed by money) showed a prolonged naming time in comparison with a neutral baseline, even after a lag of 12 intervening trials. Simpson and Kang (1994) concluded that "Processing one meaning of a homograph and responding to that meaning results in the active and specific inhibition of competing meanings" (p. 376, italics added), thus extending the idea of transient suppression of the nonselected meaning of an ambiguous word to a longer term inhibitory process that endures over a period of time. From a theoretical perspective, Simpson and Kang (1994) suggested that the observed decrement is a form of negative priming (see, e.g., Tipper, 1985), but did not present a specific model. The activation-selection model (ASM) of determining the meaning of an ambiguous word is unique in that it is able to account for the long-term effects of meaning selection without an explicit mechanism for suppressing the representation of the nonselected meaning. The model assumes that a meaning is selected when a threshold number of attributes associated with that particular meaning are activated. When a meaning is selected, the ASM assumes that the weights of the attributes that are associated with the chosen meaning are increased. This two-phase process (transient activation followed by long-term weight changes) provides a mechanism by which meaning selection at one time can affect meaning selection at a much late...

On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

“…This slower performance was expected if the ambiguity resolution process was not entirely automatic, and therefore required cognitive resources, as is the case when suppression is applied. Although others (e.g., Gorfein, Brown, and DeBiasi 2007;Activation-Selection Model) have proposed activation-only accounts to explain similar ambiguity resolution findings, these models have a difficult time explaining the load effects reported here, since activation is purported to be automatic, and therefore not require cognitive resources. Aospan also seemed to have an effect on performance in both experiments, with better performance by the high-Aospan group, so that participants with more cognitive resources performed either more accurately (Experiment 1) or faster (Experiment 2).…”

The masculine bias in fully gendered languages and ways to avoid it: A study on gender neutral forms in Québec and Swiss French

“…1 This marking of the masculine as generic is theorised to be the cause of the male bias (e.g., Lévy et al, 2014;, with the grammatically masculine form presenting a special case of lexical ambiguity as the appropriate meaning (male specific vs. generic) depends entirely on context. This can be understood through the Activation-Selection Model (Gorfein, 2001;Gorfein & Bubka, 1989;Gorfein et al, 2007).…”

Fostering the generic interpretation of grammatically masculine forms: When my aunt could be one of the mechanics

“…Processing a role noun in the masculine form activates associated features (e.g., semantic, morphological and/or phonological features) that are most relevant when selecting its meaning Gorfein, Brown & DeBiasi, 2007). As advocated by the activationselection model (Gorfein, Brown & DeBiasi, 2007), words are represented by a set of weighted attributes, of which the initial activation depends on their actual weight.…”

“…As advocated by the activationselection model (Gorfein, Brown & DeBiasi, 2007), words are represented by a set of weighted attributes, of which the initial activation depends on their actual weight. Selection of a particular meaning subsequently increases the weight of the attributes associated with this meaning.…”