The Costs and Benefits of Meaning

Gernsbacher, Morton Ann; Robertson, Rachel R.W.; Werner, Necia

doi:10.1037/e537272012-051

Cited by 7 publications

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“…Faust et al, 1997; Gernsbacher et al, 1990), but they are less likely than young adults to revise this interpretation when faced with conflicting information. The lack of revision may result from a failure to recover the unselected meaning after it has been suppressed or inhibited (Gernsbacher, Robertson, & Werner, 2001; Simpson and Adamopoulos, 2001). Some work with young adults has pointed to a similar pattern of slower or absent revision in individuals with a lower working memory capacity (Gunter et al, 2003), and all but two of the older participants from the current study would fall into the low‐span category used by Gunter and colleagues.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-related potentials reveal the effects of aging on meaning selection and revision

Meyer

Federmeier

2010

Psychophysiology

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ERPs were recorded as older adults decided if a target word was related to a lateralized ambiguous or unambiguous prime; prime-target pairs were preceded by a related or unrelated context word. In an unrelated context, N400 facilitation effects differed from those seen in young adults (Meyer & Federmeier, 2007), with older adults showing priming for the dominant meaning (e.g., BOOM-BANK-DEPOSIT) on right visual field/left hemisphere (RVF/LH) trials and priming for the subordinate meaning (e.g., BOOM-BANK-RIVER) on LVF/RH trials. Higher-functioning older adults, especially those with better inhibition, were more likely to show bilateral activation of the dominant meaning and unilateral activation of the subordinate meaning, suggesting a retention of young-like activation. In a biasing context (e.g., RIVER-BANK-DEPOSIT), older adults selected the contextually-consistent meaning, but were less likely than young adults to revise their selection. Event-Related Potentials Reveal the Effects of Aging on Meaning Selection and RevisionOlder adulthood has been associated with a general decline in cognitive functioning that includes reductions in capacities such as processing speed (Salthouse, 1996), attentional resources (Craik, 1983), inhibitory control (Hasher, Stoltzfus, Zacks, & Rypma, 1991), and both long-term and working memory (Park et al., 2002). Although verbal knowledge seems to be relatively spared across the lifespan (e.g., Park et al., 2002), these cognitive capacity changes affect the rapid use of that knowledge during on-line language processing. For example, older adults have difficulty inhibiting lexical competitors (Sommers & Danielson, 1999), making word recognition more difficult, and they show reduced abilities to use sentence context information to facilitate word processing and predict upcoming semantic information (Cameli & Phillips, 2000;Federmeier, McLennan, De Ochoa, & Kutas, 2002).Given the declines in attention, inhibition, and working memory that have been observed in older adulthood, one might predict that older adults would experience particular difficulty in the resolution of lexical ambiguity, which in young adults has been associated with working memory span and the ability to maintain multiple meanings (Miyake, Just, & Carpenter, 1994), as well as the ability to inhibit less frequent or contextually-inconsistent meanings (Gunter, Wagner, & Friederici, 2003). A deficit in ambiguity resolution would likely be Corresponding Author: Aaron M. Meyer Northwestern University 2240 Campus Drive Evanston, IL 60208 aaronmeyer@northwestern.edu (847) 491-4171. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptPsychophysiology. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2010 July 21. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author Manuscript detrimental to daily language processing tasks, as many of the most frequent English words are ambiguous (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004). However, studies that have used behavioral priming paradigms to investigate ambiguity resolution in older adulthood...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Event-related potentials reveal the effects of aging on meaning selection and revision

Meyer

Federmeier

2010

Psychophysiology

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“…Thus, the intended meaning of a single word can vary greatly depending on the linguistic context in which it appears. Psycholinguistic studies of monolingual language processing have demonstrated that, in most cases, both meanings of ambiguous words are accessed, and that the cognitive system overcomes this obstacle mostly by relying on the linguistic context (Gernsbacher, Robertson & Werner, 2001; Kambe, Rayner & Duffy, 2001;Kellas, Ferraro & Simpson, 1988; for a review of cross-linguistic lexical ambiguity resolution, see Altarriba & Gianico, 2003). It is somewhat surprising that the cross-linguistic implications of word sense ambiguity, as well as additional sources of translation ambiguity, have only recently come under experimental scrutiny within cognitive psycholinguistics (Degani, Prior, & Tokowicz, 2009;Jiang, 2002;Prior et al, 2007, Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007Tokowicz et al, 2009).…”

Section: Translation Ambiguitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Translation ambiguity in and out of context

Prior

Wintner

MacWhinney

et al. 2010

Applied Psycholinguistics

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We compare translations of single words, made by bilingual speakers in a laboratory setting, with contextualized translation choices of the same items, made by professional translators and extracted from parallel language corpora. The translation choices in both cases show moderate convergence, demonstrating that decontextualized translation probabilities partially reflect bilinguals’ life experience regarding the conditional distributions of alternative translations. Lexical attributes of the target word differ in their ability to predict translation probability: form similarity is a stronger predictor in decontextualized translation choice, whereas word frequency and semantic salience are stronger predictors for context-embedded translation choice. These findings establish the utility of parallel language corpora as important tools in psycholinguistic investigations of bilingual language processing.

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“…Simpson and his colleagues (Simpson & Adamopolous, 2001;Simpson & Kang, 1994;Simpson & Kellas, 1989) showed a cost with respect to the context-inappropriate meaning and a lack of benefit for the context-appropriate meaning at long intervals. In contrast, Gernsbacher et al (2001) showed benefits of maintaining the same meaning over long intervals but no cost when meanings were altered. Explanation of these apparently conflicting outcomes is crucial to distinguishing between transient suppression and longer lasting inhibition.…”

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confidence: 87%

“…In reviewing the differences between studies that showed long-term costs associated with homograph disambiguation (for reviews, see Gorfein, 200Ib;Simpson & Kang, 1994) and the sentence study in which costs were obtained only on an immediate trial (Gernsbacher et al, 2001), we were immediately struck by the fact that on the test trials in the sentence study, the homograph was always preceded by the disambiguating context (the homographs had been placed last in the sentence, as in other studies that used postsentence, related words to measure meaning priming). According to ASM, local context will tend to dominate under these constraints, because it activates attributes associated with a particular meaning (i.e., the set principle).…”

Section: Testing the Consequences Of The Activation-selection Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…), an increased probability of the response son was observed on a spelling test administered 24 hours later. Gernsbacher, Robertson, and Werner (2001) reported that for sentence sensibility judgments, there is a large cost of changing the meaning of a homograph on consecutive sentence trials. Participants were slower and less accurate in deciding that "She blew out the match" made sense on Trial n + 1 after deciding on Trial n that "She won the match" was a sensible sentence.…”

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Saying no to inhibition: The encoding and use of words.

Gorfeiri¹,

Brown²

Inhibition in Cognition.

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Modelers of cognitive processes have been identified as belonging to one or the other oftwo camps: inhibitophiles or inhibitophobes (see chap. 15, this volume). Therefore, it seems reasonable to make clear our points of view on the issue that underlies this volume, namely, what is the proper role of the construct of inhibition in cognitive theory? David S. Gorfein falls into the inhibitophobic camp, whereas Vincent R. Brown admits to inhibitophilic tendencies but with several caveats. Brown suggests that honest inhibitophiles

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The Costs and Benefits of Meaning

Cited by 7 publications

References 0 publications

Event-related potentials reveal the effects of aging on meaning selection and revision

Event-related potentials reveal the effects of aging on meaning selection and revision

Translation ambiguity in and out of context

Saying no to inhibition: The encoding and use of words.

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