Polysemantic lexical access: Evidence from laboratory‐induced double entenders1

Abstract

The planning of a spoken message presumably includes the consideration of various potential alternatives from which an eventual output version is somehow selected. Models of speech production typically assume that this selection process is influenced by the semantic requirements of the message itself. The possibility that message planning is influenced by factors extrinsic to the intended message is generally neglected, yet the natural speech phenomenon of double entendres provides intuitive evidence that extrinsic factors may in fact influence at least our lexical selections. This study employs two experiments on the double‐entendre phenomenon to investigate the role of extrinsic influences on lexical selection. Experiment I demonstrates that sexual arousal leads to increased encoding of sexual double‐entendre outputs for multiple‐choice cloze‐type sentences, and Experiment II demonstrates the same effect for open‐ended cloze sentences. Results are discussed in terms of two contradictions to contemporary encoding models: (7) lexical activation may be triggered by at least two (versus one) simultaneously active semantic networks; and (2) at least one of these may be independent of semantic message constraints.