Lexical Ambiguity Resolution Research Articles

Working Memory Capacity and Contextual Novel Linguistic Input: A Cross-Modal Priming Study on Persian-English Subordinate Bilinguals.

The present study investigated the effect of verbal working memory capacity (VWMC) on the processing of semantic information during on-line lexical ambiguity resolution of bilinguals. Seventeen Persian-English subordinate bilinguals of similar proficiency level were recruited to perform two experimental tasks: (1) a multi-load-level reading span task designed to measure their VWMC and (2) a cross-modal semantic priming task (CMPT), 24h subsequent to the last encoding session, to assess their performance on semantic processing of L2 homographs whose subordinate readings were deemed "novel" for them. An overall 2 × 3 repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a statistically significant difference in the processing of the encoded semantic information between high and low WMC participants. The findings of the experiments lend support to the veracity of the assumptions made by Reordered Access Model in that biasing semantic context facilitates the ambiguity resolution of lexical items. Lastly, the pedagogical implications of the findings were expounded on.

Disambiguating ambiguity: A comparative analysis of lexical decision-making in native and non-native English speakers

Making lexical decisions to disambiguate multiple-meaning words or senses provides clear evidence of word recognition, processing systems and representation in the mental lexicon. This comparative study explores non-native English speakers’ and native English speakers’ cognitive mechanisms employed in phonological and lexical ambiguity resolution embedded in auditory and visual utterances. English proficiency and vocabulary tests and two lexical decision tests were conducted with 35 EFL undergraduate students and four native English monolingual speakers. The effects of factors such as L2 proficiency and familiarity on ambiguity resolution in addition to the resolution techniques employed were also explored. Our findings suggest that the differences in disambiguating L2 words among native English speakers and non-native English speakers might indicate different comprehension, representation and processing patterns. The ambiguity type most likely has a major role in determining the diverse phenomenon of ambiguity resolution. More specifically, there was evidence of significant differences in homophone use, metaphorical polysemy and homonym ambiguity resolution between the two groups, excluding metonymous polysemy. Homophones and polysemy were the least problematic and challenging lexical ambiguity types unlike homonymy for the non-native group. Other results also revealed the positive effects of L2 proficiency and L2 word familiarity on ambiguity resolution. Thus, this study also has important implications considering the vital role of vocabulary in L2 competence and knowledge.

The Processing of Lexical Ambiguity: Evidence from Child and Adult Greek

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in homonym meaning activation in monolingual speakers of Greek, children and adults, using a cross-modal priming paradigm. Additionally, all participants conducted a verbal working memory task and an inhibition task so as to examine whether the use of sentential context for lexical ambiguity resolution relates to age and/or cognitive processing capacity. The data analysis showed (a) major processing differences between adults and children due to ambiguity and sentential context, (b) children’s processing times affected by cognitive skills while adults’ processing unaffected, and (c) visual word recognition intact for all participants.

어휘적 중의성 해소과정에서 나타나는 초등학생과 대학생의 읽기 특성: 안구운동 추적연구

어휘적 중의성 해소과정에서 나타나는 초등학생과 대학생의 읽기 특성: 안구운동 추적연구

Lexical ambiguity resolution & bilingual language experience: Evidence from Albanian-Greek bilingual children of immigrant families

The present study aims at exploring lexical ambiguity resolution in bilingual children employing homonym meaning activation. Specifically, we are examining the processing of Greek homonyms in relation to the language input, verbal ability and cognitive capacity of 10–12 years old bilingual children raised in an immigrant context, in which Albanian is their heritage language and Greek is the majority language. We systematically assessed sentence context effects in homonym meaning activation using a cross-modal priming task. Primes were sentences biasing towards the dominant, subordinate, or neither meaning of a sentence-final homonym while visual targets were related to either meaning of the homonym. To measure the bilingual language experience and address variability issues in the dataset, we administered a background questionnaire that focused on acquisition history, bi-literacy practices and self-reported competence in each language along with a standardized test for verbal ability in Greek. The study's findings show that frequency and context are significant parameters in the examination of ambiguity resolution and underline the contribution of verbal working memory to lexical processing. Additionally, our results highlight the role of the bilingual language experience in the function of the mental lexicon and the potential benefits of bi-literacy development.

The Effects of Word Processing, Recognition and Context in Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

This article aims to discuss the effects of word processing, recognition and context in lexical ambiguity resolution, trying to find an answer to how the reader-listener determines the contextually appropriate meaning of a word. Ambiguity resolution is analyzed and explored in two perspectives: the context in which the lexical items appear and the activation of all the meanings that an ambiguous word has. There is no clear-cut answer to lexical ambiguity resolution and there is a great debate about the role of the context in the activation of the meaning of ambiguous words.

Animacy interactions with individual variability in sentence production and comprehension reveal similar lexically driven competitive processes.

Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally recruit motor-related conflict not necessarily present in comprehension. To examine these possibilities, we combined an experimental animacy-driven manipulation eliciting difficulty in separate production and comprehension tasks with an examination of how this manipulation interacted with individual variability in motor-related and lexicosemantic conflict resolution performance beyond vocabulary measures. We reasoned that a different pattern of interactions for production and comprehension would point to distinct processes across these tasks, whereas interactions with the same individual performance task would indicate similar conflict-related processes. We found that beyond a significant role of vocabulary, only a measure of context-dependent lexical ambiguity resolution interacted with the animacy manipulation in the production and the comprehension task. These findings suggest a role for linguistic knowledge and similar lexically driven competitive processes in both sentence production and comprehension. Alongside current computational models, these results raise the possibility that despite different task demands, some production and comprehension competitive processes are not entirely distinct from one another nor separable from lexical knowledge. Implications for current views on the relationship between sentence production and comprehension are discussed. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

The effects of aging and perceived loneliness on lexical ambiguity resolution.

Language is central to the interactional nature of the social life within which it is situated. To react or respond in a particular situation, we must be able to recognize the social situation. Growing evidence has demonstrated the negative impact of perceived loneliness on late-life executive functions. Yet little is known about how social factors impact language processing for older people. The current study aims to fill this gap, first by assessing age-related changes in lexical processing during Chinese word reading, second, by examining whether older adults' individual differences, such as processing speed and verbal abilities, modulate meaning retrieval and, third, by investigating whether perceived loneliness can hinder word reading. The use of compound words in Chinese enables significant sublexical ambiguity, requiring varying executive load during word recognition: when a word's constituent characters carry multiple meanings, readers must consider the meaning contributions of both constituent characters and use top-down word information to determine the most accurate meaning of the ambiguous character, a process termed "sublexical ambiguity resolution." In this study, adults read real Chinese words (including both sublexically ambiguous and unambiguous words) and pseudowords, and they were asked to make lexical decisions. Older adults exhibited greater lexicality effects (i.e., real words were easier to be identified than pseudowords) and similar sublexical ambiguity effects compared with young adults. Among older participants, processing speed could account for their ability to differentiate between words and pseudowords. In contrast, the level of perceived loneliness modulated the efficacy of sublexical ambiguity resolution: the participants with higher perceived loneliness displayed a greater sublexical ambiguity disadvantage effect. These results indicate that perceived loneliness may affect the use of contextual information in meaning retrieval during reading. The findings provide an important link between social connections and language processing.

Does diacritics-based lexical disambiguation modulate word frequency, length, and predictability effects? An eye-movements investigation of processing Arabic diacritics.

In Arabic, a predominantly consonantal script that features a high incidence of lexical ambiguity (heterophonic homographs), glyph-like marks called diacritics supply vowel information that clarifies how each consonant should be pronounced, and thereby disambiguate the pronunciation of consonantal strings. Diacritics are typically omitted from print except in situations where a particular homograph is not sufficiently disambiguated by the surrounding context. In three experiments we investigated whether the presence of disambiguating diacritics on target homographs modulates word frequency, length, and predictability effects during reading. In all experiments, the subordinate representation of the target homographs was instantiated by the diacritics (in the diacritized conditions), and by the context subsequent to the target homographs. The results replicated the effects of word frequency (Experiment 1), word length (Experiment 2), and predictability (Experiment 3). However, there was no evidence that diacritics-based disambiguation modulated these effects in the current study. Rather, diacritized targets in all experiments attracted longer first pass and later (go past and/or total fixation count) processing. These costs are suggested to be a manifestation of the subordinate bias effect. Furthermore, in all experiments, the diacritics-based disambiguation facilitated later sentence processing, relative to when the diacritics were absent. The reported findings expand existing knowledge about processing of diacritics, their contribution towards lexical ambiguity resolution, and sentence processing.

The Co-Constructed Logic Framework for Understanding Children’s Acts and Their Intentions

With the characteristics of the nonmonotonic logic and defeasible inference, abductive reasoning has been formalized in the field of artificial intelligence, dealing with the local pragmatics (e.g., the resolution of coreference, resolving syntactic and lexical ambiguity and interpreting metonymy and metaphor), recognizing discourse structure and even the speaker’s plan and other issues for natural language understanding. However, Hobbs’ analysis of abduction in recognizing the speaker’s plan was conducted only from the point of view of the verbal information processing that the listener does. To demonstrate the collaborative way that conversational partners working together to understand the logic of human acts and their intentions, this article analyzes the two conversations about the parents questioning their children’s intention for their acts with an abductive reasoning method. The results show that children and parents co-construct segments of discourse with coherence relations across several conversational turns, by that way they build together a simplified framework for understanding the logic of human acts and their intention. For example, when the father and his children co-constructed coherent segments of discourse with the result relation between them, they completed the particular intention understanding at the same time. This research helps in enriching the logic structure of artificial intelligence applications such as visual question answering models and enhancing their reasoning abilities.

Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution in Cantonese Chinese.

The present study examined how working memory functions in the underlying mechanism of the lexical disambiguation process (in activation approach or in inhibition approach). We recruited sixty native Cantonese listeners to participate in two experimental tasks: (a) a Cantonese-version reading span task to measure their working memory (WM) capacity and (b) a standard cross-modal priming task to measure the lexical disambiguation time. The results revealed that (1) the underlying mechanism of the disambiguation process seemed favorable for an inhibition approach and (2) the frequency of the individual meanings of the ambiguous words and the numbers of their meanings might interact with the WM capacity during lexical access, particularly for the low-WM span group.

Effects of contextual facilitation and inhibitory reaction in lexical ambiguity resolution for the Han and Uyghur nationalities

Effects of contextual facilitation and inhibitory reaction in lexical ambiguity resolution for the Han and Uyghur nationalities

An Assessment Into The Main Claims Of The Lexical Ambiguity Resolution Model

An Assessment Into The Main Claims Of The Lexical Ambiguity Resolution Model

Лексическая неоднозначность в экспериментальных исследованиях: метаанализ

The article analyses experimental studies of lexical ambiguity (polysemy and homonymy). In total, 42 papers published between 1981 and 2017 were selected for analysis. Selected works were analyzed from the point of view of a) interaction of the main factors of lexical ambiguity resolution (meaning dominance and context), b) modularity/interactivity of language systems. The choice of these issues was caused by the fact that, despite a significant number of papers addressing them, a common theoretical model of lexical ambiguity resolution is still missing. The analysis concluded that none of the existing models could be chosen as the only true one. I believe that it is more promising to combine all models into one; in this case, we should not talk about “models” but about “algorithms” or “strategies”. This merge is compatible with the results of studies of hemispheric asymmetry, which showed that the right and left hemispheres differently process ambiguous words. This difference is projected on the difference between the two main points of view on language processing, interactive and modular. Also, as a result of the analysis, the properties of meaning dominance and context as the main factors influencing the perception of ambiguity are summarized, and the ways and possibilities of their interaction are determined. These factors can participate in the process of resolving ambiguity autonomously or together, with different functions, speed, and levels of perception.

The Role of Basal Ganglia Reinforcement Learning in Lexical Ambiguity Resolution.

The current study aimed to elucidate the contributions of the subcortical basal ganglia to human language by adopting the view that these structures engage in a basic neurocomputation that may account for its involvement across a wide range of linguistic phenomena. Specifically, we tested the hypothesis that basal ganglia reinforcement learning (RL) mechanisms may account for variability in semantic selection processes necessary for ambiguity resolution. To test this, we used a biased homograph lexical ambiguity priming task that allowed us to measure automatic processes for resolving ambiguity toward high-frequency word meanings. Individual differences in task performance were then related to indices of basal ganglia RL, which were used to group subjects into three learning styles: (a) Choosers who learn by seeking high reward probability stimuli; (b) Avoiders, who learn by avoiding low reward probability stimuli; and (c) Balanced participants, whose learning reflects equal contributions of choose and avoid processes. The results suggest that balanced individuals had significantly lower access to subordinate, or low-frequency, homograph word meanings. Choosers and Avoiders, on the other hand, had higher access to the subordinate word meaning even after a long delay between prime and target. Experimental findings were then tested using an ACT-R computational model of RL that learns from both positive and negative feedback. Results from the computational model simulations confirm and extend the pattern of behavioral findings, providing an RL account of individual differences in lexical ambiguity resolution.

I Scream for Ice Cream: Resolving Lexical Ambiguity with Sub-phonemic Information.

This study uses a response mouse-tracking paradigm to examine the role of sub-phonemic information in online lexical ambiguity resolution of continuous speech. We examine listeners' sensitivity to the sub-phonemic information that is specific to the ambiguous internal open juncture /s/-stop sequences in American English (e.g., "place kin" vs. "play skin"), that is, voice onset time (VOT) indicating different degrees of aspiration (e.g., long VOT for "kin" vs. short VOT for "skin") in connected speech contexts. A cross-splicing method was used to create two-word sequences (e.g., "place kin" or "play skin") with matching VOTs (long for "kin"; short for "skin") or mismatching VOTs (short for "kin"; long for "skin"). Participants (n = 20) heard the two-word sequences, while looking at computer displays with the second word in the left/right corner ("KIN" and "SKIN"). Then, listeners' click responses and mouse movement trajectories were recorded. Click responses show significant effects of VOT manipulation, while mouse trajectories do not. Our results show that stop-release information, whether temporal or spectral, can (mis)guide listeners' interpretation of the possible location of a word boundary between /s/ and a following stop, even when other aspects in the acoustic signal (e.g., duration of /s/) point to the alternative segmentation. Taken together, our results suggest that segmentation and lexical access are highly attuned to bottom-up phonetic information; our results have implications for a model of spoken language recognition with position-specific representations available at the prelexical level and also allude to the possibility that detailed phonetic information may be stored in the listeners' lexicons.

The use of acoustic information in lexical ambiguity resolution: an event-related potential study.

Words that can be used as both noun and verb create regions of syntactic ambiguity that could create processing challenges for listeners. However, acoustic properties, such as duration, differ between noun and verb uses of such words, and listeners may use these differences to facilitate ambiguity processing. In this study, we replaced noun uses of ambiguous words with verb uses to determine whether these manipulations affected the N400 event-related potential, which is associated with semantic violations, or the P600 component, which is associated with syntactic ambiguity. The results suggest that the acoustic differences between noun/verb polysemes mitigate the extent to which these words are perceived as ambiguous, although the results do not indicate whether replacing one with the other produces a meaning violation. Durational differences in noun/verb polysemes may affect their processing in fluent speech.

Cognitive Control, Semantic Processing, and Semantic Ambiguity Resolution in Individuals with Aphasia

Event Abstract Back to Event Cognitive Control, Semantic Processing, and Semantic Ambiguity Resolution in Individuals with Aphasia Wiltrud Fassbinder1*, Rebecca Hunting Pompon2, Mohammed Aldhoayan3, Hyun Seung Kim1, Hyunsoo Yoo4, Johannes Hüsing5, Kevin Dalziel6, Jeremy Mancini7 and Malcolm R. McNeil1 1 University of Pittsburgh, Communication Sciences and Disorders, United States 2 University of Delaware, Communication Science and Disorders, United States 3 University of Pittsburgh, Health Information Management, United States 4 The University of Texas at El Paso, Rehabilitation Sciences, United States 5 Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, Koordinierungszentrum für Klinische Studien (KKS), Germany 6 VA Northern California Health Care System, Speech Language Pathology, United States 7 Jefferson University Hospitals, Thomas Jefferson University, United States INTRODUCTION Several imaging and lesion-based studies suggest that cognitive control plays an important role in semantic ambiguities resolution[1]. However, two recent behavioral studies indicate that such interference resolution may be more related to verbal semantic abilities than to cognitive control[2,3], with better semantic abilities resulting in more ambiguity interference[2]. While deficits in cognitive control are well documented in individuals with aphasia (IWA)[4,5,6], the effects of such deficits for ambiguity resolution have not been investigated in conjunction with semantic abilities. This study investigates how in IWA, cognitive control and lexical-semantic abilities contribute to comprehension efficiency and success in ambiguity resolution. It was predicted that for IWA, deficits in cognitive control result in increased ambiguity interference and decreased accuracy, whereas deficits in lexical-semantic processing result in decreased ambiguity interference, on a sentence comprehension task (SCT) requiring lexical ambiguity resolution. PROCEDURES Ninety-five IWA completed all study tasks. Cognitive control was indexed as the RT ratio of incongruent/neutral items in a picture-word interference task (PWI ratio). Lexical semantic processing was measured as accuracy in a category judgment task (CJ accuracy). On the SCT, participants read sentences with a disambiguating verb and an ambiguous object, followed by a probe word related to alternative meaning of the ambiguous object (He drank the port today – docks)[7]. In the control condition, ambiguous objects were replaced with unambiguous words. All timing measures were modeled in linear mixed effect models, and accuracy was fitted using logistic mixed regression models[8]. Subjects and items were entered as random effects (including intercepts and slopes[9]), and ambiguity (ambiguous/control), PWI ratio, and CJ accuracy as fixed effects. RESULTS RT IWA with higher PWI ratios responded faster in the SCT than those with lower ratios (95% CI [-14.4 – -2.8]). Main effects for ambiguity (95% CI [-.8 – -.04]) and lexical-semantic processing (95% CI [-1.4 – .2]) were modulated by an interaction (95% CI [.2 – 1]): Ambiguity interference was only evident in IWA with higher CJ accuracy (see Figure 1). Accuracy Ambiguous items were less accurate than unambiguous items (95% CI [.2– 1]). DISCUSSION Cognitive Control: The lack of relationship between PWI interference and SCT ambiguity for RT and accuracy suggests that different aspects of cognitive control are required in the two tasks6: In the PWI task, inhibition is task-driven and mainly proactive, whereas in the SCT inhibition is mainly reactive. However, higher PWI interference is associated with faster judgments, suggesting that it reflects an underlying cognitive factor relevant to processing efficiency, possibly processing speed. Further analyses of available data will examine this possibility. Lexical-semantic processing: Faster lexical semantic processing was associated with faster RTs and more ambiguity interference, consistent with the hypothesis that better semantic processing results in faster activation of alternative meanings, causing more interference[4]. However, differences in CJ accuracy did not affect SCT accuracy, suggesting that this interference was successfully resolved. For individuals with poorer lexical-semantic processing, RTs were slower, and there was less/no ambiguity interference, suggesting that competing word meanings were not sufficiently re-activated to interfere with the decision time or comprehension success. Figure 1

Eye Movements in English Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

English Language ambiguity has always been one of the major concerns of psycholinguistic research. A number of studies have been carried out to investigate different types of ambiguity resolution, including phonological ambiguity resolution, lexical ambiguity resolution, syntactic ambiguity resolution and pragmatic ambiguity resolution. Studies of lexical ambiguity resolution have found that lexically ambiguous words with two meanings of the same frequency took longer to read than lexically unambiguous words, suggesting that different meanings of ambiguous words compete for integration to the local context. This paper gives an overview of the classical psycholinguistic studies on English lexical ambiguity resolution which employed the eye-tracking technology.

Lexical ambiguity resolution during sentence processing in Parkinson's disease: An event-related potential study.

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to investigate lexical ambiguity resolution during sentence processing in 16 people with Parkinson’s disease (PD) and 16 healthy controls. Sentences were presented word-by-word on computer screen, and participants were required to decide if a subsequent target word was related to the meaning of the sentence. The task consisted of related, unrelated and ambiguous trials. For the ambiguous trials, the sentence ended with an ambiguous word and the target was related to one of the meanings of that word, but not the one captured by the sentence context (e.g., ‘He dug with the spade’, Target ‘ACE’). Both groups demonstrated slower reaction times and lower accuracy for the ambiguous condition relative to the unrelated condition, however accuracy was impacted by the ambiguous condition to a larger extent in the PD group. These results suggested that PD patients experience increased difficulties with contextual ambiguity resolution. The ERP results did not reflect increased ambiguity resolution difficulties in PD, as a similar N400 effect was evident for the unrelated and ambiguous condition in both groups. However, the magnitude of the N400 for these conditions was correlated with a measure of inhibition in the PD group, but not the control group. The ERP results suggest that semantic processing may be more compromised in PD patients with increased response inhibition deficits.