Abstract

• Recent experience with homonyms primes their interpretation tens of minutes later. • Priming occurs from sentences in which prior context guides disambiguation. • Priming can occur for sentences in which ambiguous words require reinterpretation. • “Good enough” listening tasks reduce priming if sentences require reinterpretation. • Findings reveal learning mechanisms by which lexical-semantic knowledge is updated. A single encounter with an ambiguous word (e.g. bark, ball) in the context of a less-frequent meaning (e.g. “Sally worried about how crowded the ball would be.”) can shift the later interpretation of the word toward the same subordinate meaning. This lexical-semantic retuning functions to improve future comprehension of ambiguous words. The present paper investigates the relationship between this form of learning and the specific processes that occur during sentence comprehension. One possibility is that lexical-semantic retuning occurs immediately upon hearing the ambiguous word, during initial meaning activation and selection, so priming should be strongest when the disambiguating context is provided before the ambiguous word (prior disambiguation). Alternatively, priming may relate to the degree of reinterpretation needed, which would predict maximal learning when the word is initially misunderstood because the critical context is given after the word (subsequent disambiguation, e.g. “Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded.”). In four experiments, adults listened to prior and subsequent disambiguation sentences, and were later tested on their interpretations of primed and unprimed ambiguous words. The results showed that lexical-semantic retuning can occur for both sentence types. Importantly, however, the emergence of priming for subsequent disambiguation sentences was sensitive to the prime conditions: when the task could potentially be performed without needing to re-analyse the ambiguity, then no significant priming was observed. This is consistent with the ‘good enough’ view of language processing which states that representations can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation, and that lexical-semantic retuning operates on the output of good-enough interpretation. More generally, our findings suggest that lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants’ final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation.

Highlights

  • The ability to access word meanings rapidly and accurately is a key component of language comprehension

  • This account would parallel results showing greater perceptual learning for perceptually-ambiguous or degraded stimuli when disambiguating information is available before, rather than after, the ambiguity. This view predicts that word-meaning priming would be reduced, or even absent, when the critical disambiguating context is given after the ambiguous word. For such subsequent disambiguation sentences (e.g., “Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded.”), the comprehender is likely to select the inappropriate dominant meaning (e.g. ‘round object’ meaning of ‘ball’) around 200 to 1500 ms after encountering the ambiguous word (Onifer & Swinney, 1981; Seidenberg et al, 1982; Swinney, 1979)

  • We examined the processing of ambig­ uous words that were previously heard in one of two synonymous sen­ tence types: one in which the subordinate-meaning context was presented before the ambiguous word and another in which the context was presented after the ambiguous word

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Summary

Introduction

The ability to access word meanings rapidly and accurately is a key component of language comprehension. This task is made difficult by the inherent ambiguity of most words: more than 80% of common En­ glish words have multiple dictionary definitions (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002). Successful language comprehension requires that, for each ambiguous word, the listener/reader selects the correct interpretation from the set of familiar meanings. This semantic disam­ biguation process is facilitated by comprehenders’ knowledge of distri­ butional properties of word meanings. “the fountain pen”) compared to a subordinate meaning When the word is presented in a neutral context (e.g. “Sally worried that the ball would be too...”), processing slows when subsequent context is encountered which is only consistent with a subordinate meaning (e.g. “crowded”), compared to when this context is compatible with the dominant meaning (e.g. “expensive”; see Rodd, 2020; Vitello & Rodd, 2015 for reviews)

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