The N400 elicited by homonyms in puns: Two primes are not better than one

Abstract

To comprehend a pun involving a homonym (e.g., The prince with a bad tooth got a crown), both meanings of the homonym must be accessed and selected. Previous ERP studies have shown that the N400 reflects lexicosemantic processing, but none have directly investigated the N400 elicited by homonyms in the unique context of puns. Here, N400 priming effects showed that the dual context of puns (e.g., the primes prince and tooth) did not facilitate homonym processing in comparison to single dominant biasing (e.g., The prince with a bad leg got a crown) or subordinate biasing (e.g., The adult with a bad tooth got a crown) conditions. However, homonyms did elicit a less negative N400 (i.e., priming) in the pun condition in comparison to the neutral context condition (e.g., The adult with a bad leg got a crown). These findings are interpreted in terms of the dominant advantage and subordinate bias effect posited by the reordered access model of homonym processing, and in terms of N400 amplitude as an index of how consistently various sources of semantic featural information converge on one lexical item, even when two lexical items must be activated for comprehension.

The Effect of Salience on Chinese Pun Comprehension: A Visual World Paradigm Study

“…This idea has been frequently used to explain the so-called subordinate-biased effect (Duffy et al, 1988(Duffy et al, , 2001). In the case of a pun, where the two meanings are similarly supported, this model also predicts that the salient (dominant) meaning will be accessed first, then followed by the less salient (subordinate) meaning (Sheridan et al, 2009;Dholakia et al, 2016).…”

“…While in the pun context, no such "reordering" occurred since the balanced pun context could not reverse the frequency advantage of the salient meaning. In another ERP study, Dholakia et al (2016) found that the pun context condition (e.g., The prince with a bad tooth got a crown) elicited smaller N400 amplitudes (i.e., priming effect) on the homonyms than the neutral context condition (e.g., The adult with a bad leg got a crown). However, the pun context did not elicit a larger N400 priming effect in comparison to a single dominant biasing context (e.g., The prince with a bad leg got a crown).…”

Retuning of lexical-semantic representations: Repetition and spacing effects in word-meaning priming.

“…Again, encountering the ambiguous word itself is crucial to this comprehension facilitation, since reading subordinate context alone in a prime sentence (i.e., without the ambiguous word itself being presented) does not facilitate comprehension of the subordinate word-meaning itself when it is read up to a few minutes later (Leinenger & Rayner, 2013). Furthermore, comprehension can be (but is not always; Binder & Morris, 1995) impeded when the meaning of the second encounter is inconsistent with the first, showing that recent experience with a particular word-meaning can also hinder subsequent comprehension in cases where the subsequent encounter has the alternative meaning (Bainbridge, Lewandowsky, & Kirsner, 1993; Copland, 2006; Dholakia, Meade, & Coch, 2016; Simpson & Kang, 1994; Simpson & Kellas, 1989). Together, these very short-term (up to only a few minutes) priming studies clearly demonstrate that word-meaning representations are sensitive to very recent experience with those words, and can update rapidly to accommodate that experience.…”

Disambiguating the ambiguity disadvantage effect: Behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for semantic competition.

“…The literature on semantic priming has shown that targets preceded by related primes tend to elicit smaller N400 amplitudes than those preceded by unrelated primes (for a review, see Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). This "N400 priming" effect has often been used to investigate patterns of meaning activation in homonyms, both in isolation (e.g., Atchley & Kwasny, 2003;Klepousniotou et al, 2012) and biasing context (e.g., Dholakia, Meade, & Coch, 2016;Swaab, Brown, & Hagoort, 2003). The general finding from such studies is that meanings that are highly frequent or supported by surrounding context are more readily available, and therefore produce greater N400 priming.…”