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

Hannah N Betts,Rebecca A Gilbert,Jennifer M Rodd,Zainab B Okedara,Zhenguang G Cai

doi:10.1037/xlm0000507

Abstract

Current models of word-meaning access typically assume that lexical-semantic representations of ambiguous words (e.g., ‘bark of the dog/tree’) reach a relatively stable state in adulthood, with only the relative frequencies of meanings and immediate sentence context determining meaning preference. However, recent experience also affects interpretation: recently encountered word-meanings become more readily available (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013). Here, 3 experiments investigated how multiple encounters with word-meanings influence the subsequent interpretation of these ambiguous words. Participants heard ambiguous words contextually-disambiguated towards a particular meaning and, after a 20- to 30-min delay, interpretations of the words were tested in isolation. We replicate the finding that 1 encounter with an ambiguous word biased the later interpretation of this word towards the primed meaning for both subordinate (Experiments 1, 2, 3) and dominant meanings (Experiment 1). In addition, for the first time, we show cumulative effects of multiple repetitions of both the same and different meanings. The effect of a single subordinate exposure persisted after a subsequent encounter with the dominant meaning, compared to a dominant exposure alone (Experiment 1). Furthermore, 3 subordinate word-meaning repetitions provided an additional boost to priming compared to 1, although only when their presentation was spaced (Experiments 2, 3); massed repetitions provided no such boost (Experiments 1, 3). These findings indicate that comprehension is guided by the collective effect of multiple recently activated meanings and that the spacing of these activations is key to producing lasting updates to the lexical-semantic network.

Highlights

Current models of word-meaning access typically assume that lexical-semantic representations of ambiguous words (e.g., ‘bark of the dog/tree’) reach a relatively stable state in adulthood, with only the relative frequencies of meanings and immediate sentence context determining meaning preference
The present findings suggest that the absence of a priming boost following three repetitions in Experiment 1 was attributable to their massed nature, these two experiments differ in several ways other than the spacing of the ambiguous words
The results replicate the word-meaning priming effect and go further in showing that multiple subordinate repetitions provided an additional boost to priming compared with one repetition when these encounters were spaced, this boost was eliminated when multiple repetitions were massed, at least in a word association test

Summary

Introduction

Current models of word-meaning access typically assume that lexical-semantic representations of ambiguous words (e.g., ‘bark of the dog/tree’) reach a relatively stable state in adulthood, with only the relative frequencies of meanings and immediate sentence context determining meaning preference. It has been shown that comprehenders make use of a range of cues to determine the most appropriate meaning of these semantically ambiguous words These cues include the relative frequency with which a wordmeaning occurs in a language ( known as meaning dominance) and the immediate sentence context in which the word is encountered. The use of meaning dominance reflects an optimal strategy in word interpretation on the part of the comprehender: when there is no cue to indicate otherwise, the listener is likely to interpret a word with its most frequent, “default” meaning Such a view implies that people have representations of meaning frequencies that are relatively stable across time, as their default interpretation would only be overridden by immediate sentence context. The highly influential reordered access model takes both immediate context and longterm knowledge into account, but does not mention possible changes in word-meaning representations over intermediate time periods (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988)

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Discussion

Conclusion