Design of a corpus of stimuli for a psycholinguistic study of lexical ambiguity (original) (raw)

Semantic ambiguity norms for 530 Spanish words

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.

The representation of polysemy in the mental lexicon and its processing

2018

Polysemy, the lexical semantic phenomenon in which a word form has different but related senses, is pervasive in natural languages. Examples of polysemy encompass regular polysemy and idiosyncratic forms, such as paper and atmosphere respectively. Nonetheless, regardless of its abundance in languages, it was not until 1980, with the appearance of cognitive grammar, that polysemy was given considerable attention. While this phenomenon does not seem to pose a problem in everyday communication, it has proved to be notably difficult to treat both theoretically and empirically (Falkum & Vicente, 2015, p. 3). At present, there is discussion regarding the representation of polysemy in the mental lexicon and its processing. The purpose of this dissertation is to present the main theories which are currently being discussed by linguists on this topic. In order to achieve this aim, I start by defining and comparing polysemy to homonymy, the phenomenon by which one word form has, at least, two different and unrelated meanings. I explain the criteria and some of the tests which can be applied to distinguish them (e.g. etymological derivation, native intuition, pronominalization and ellipsis). Moreover, I define the types in which polysemy can be subdivided, emphasizing metonymically and metaphorically motivated polysemy. After polysemy has been distinguished from homonymy and its subdivisions have been explained, I move on to the main section of this paper: The representation and processing of polysemy in the mental lexicon. The representation is the information which is stored in the mental lexicon for the different types of word forms. The processing is how that information is accessed and used in language production and comprehension. This being explained, I discuss what I consider to be the two main approaches regarding this issue. On the one hand, the theory named Sense Enumeration approach which postulates that the related senses of polysemous words are both stored and processed like the unrelated senses of homonymous terms. On the other hand, the other main theory is the One Representation approach, which proposes that polysemous and homonymous terms differ in how their meanings are stored and processed. There are various views with different perspectives which lie within this theory. Then, I present empirical evidence which partially support both theories. However, I conclude my paper by taking a stance for the One Representation approach.

The Influence of the Experimental Context on Lexical Ambiguity Effects

Teme, 2022

Previous research with the visual lexical decision task demonstrated that polysemous words (multiple related senses) have a processing advantage when compared to unambiguous words, whereas homonymous words (multiple unrelated meanings) have a processing disadvantage. Although the same pattern of results was observed in Serbian, the two effects were investigated in separate studies. The aim of this study was to test whether the effects can be replicated when both types of ambiguity are presented within the same experimental list. To test this, we conducted three experiments. In the first one, the mixed presentation of unambiguous, homonymous, and polysemous words did not reveal any of the ambiguity effects, leading to the conclusion that the experimental context may affect the emergence of ambiguity effects. The other two experiments were conducted to explicitly control for the experimental context. In both experiments, we presented each ambiguity type within the same block and counterbalanced the order of the block presentation. These experiments revealed the presence of the polysemy advantage, but not the homonymy disadvantage, which is a common pattern in literature. Polysemy effects typically emerge relatively easily, whereas the homonymy disadvantage requires additional conditions. Finally, we conclude that experimental context does play a role in ambiguity processing, although the order of presentation does not affect the overall results.

Frequency of meaning use for ambiguous and unambiguous words

1999

When using verbal stimuli, researchers usually equate words on frequency ofuse. However, for some ambiguous words (e.g., ball as a round object or a formal dance), frequency counts fail to distinguish how often a particular meaning is used. This study evaluates the use of ratings to estimate meaning frequency.Analyses show that ratings correlate highlywith word frequency counts when orthographie and meaning frequencies should converge, are not unduly influenced by semantic factors, and may provide a better measure ofrelative meaning dominance than the word association task does. Furthermore, the ratings allow researchers to equate or manipulate frequency of meaning use for ambiguous and unambiguous words. Ratings for 211 words are reported. Lexically ambiguous words are widely used in psycholinguistic research. In word recognition studies, homonyms,' such as (baseball and vampire) bat, have been used to study context and frequency-of-meaning effects in lexical access (for a review, see Simpson, 1984, 1994), number-of-meanings effects (e.g., Millis & Button, 1989; Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970), summation of priming (Balota & Paul, 1996), and other issues. Homophones, such as steel and steal, have been used to explore orthographic priming effects (e.g., Grainger & Ferrand, 1994) and to test the influence ofphonology on visual word recognition processes (e.g., Fleming, 1993; Jared & Seidenberg, 1991; VanOrden, 1987). Homographs with different pronunciations, such as wind, pronounced as Iwajndl or /wmd/, have also been used to study these questions (e.g., Kawamoto & Zernblidge, 1992). In word produetion research, homonyms and homophones have been used to investigate open-versus closed-class vocabulary differences (Dell, 1990), the locus ofword frequency effects (Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994), the effect of phonological priming on word selection (Griffin, 1995), phonology's role in subject-verb agreement errors (Bock & Eberhard, 1993), and the relationship between lexical processing stages (Cutting & Ferreira, 1999). However, part ofwhat makes ambiguous words interesting-namely, the association ofa single form with multiple meanings-also makes

BRIEF REPORTS Making Sense of Word Senses: The Comprehension of Polysemy Depends on Sense Overlap

2016

Studies of polysemy are few in number and are contradictory. Some have found differences between polysemy and homonymy (L. Frazier & K. Rayner, 1990), and others have found similarities (D. K. Klein & G. Murphy, 2001). The authors investigated this issue using the methods of D. K. Klein and G. Murphy (2001), in whose study participants judged whether ambiguous words embedded in word pairs (e.g., tasty chicken) made sense as a function of a cooperating, conflicting, or neutral context. The ambiguous words were independently rated as having low, moderate, or highly overlapping senses to approximate a continuum from homonymy to metonymic polysemy. The effects of meaning dominance were examined. Words with highly overlapping meanings (e.g., metonymy) showed reduced effects of context and dominance compared with words with moderately or low overlapping meanings (e.g., metaphorical polysemy and homonymy). These results suggest that the comprehension of ambiguous words is mediated by the s...