Effects of polysemy in lexical decision and naming: An alternative to lexical access accounts.

Abstract

The effects of polysemy (number of meanings) and word frequency were examined in lexical decision and naming tasks. Polysemy effects were observed in both tasks. In the lexical decision task, high- and low-frequency words produced identical polysemy effects. In the naming task, however, polysemy interacted with frequency, with polysemy effects being limited to low-frequency words. When degraded stimuli were used in both tasks, the interaction appeared not only in naming but also in lexical decision. Because stimulus degradation also produced an effect of spelling-sound regularity in the lexical decision task, the different relationships between polysemy and frequency appear to be due to whether responding was based primarily on orthographic or phonological codes. As such, the effects of polysemy seem to be due to the nature of task-specific processes. An explanation in terms of M. S. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland's (1989) and D. C. Plaut and J. L. McClelland's (1993) parallel distributed processing models is proposed. One of the most fundamental issues in reading research is how a word's meaning is derived from the processing of a visual input. Chumbley and Balota (1984) suggested that essentially all major models of word recognition, such as Morton's (1969) logogen model, Becker's (1980) verification model, and Forster's (1976) lexical search model, assume at least two processes are involved. The first is the process of accessing the lexicon and the second is the process of meaning determination. The verification model and the lexical search model assume that lexical access involves a sequential matching process between information extracted from the visual stimulus and lexical representations, with representations for higher frequency words checked first. The logogen model assumes differential threshold values for the lexical representations depending