Unrelated Meanings Research Articles

Disambiguating the ambiguity advantage effect in word recognition: An advantage for polysemous but not homonymous words

Previous lexical decision studies reported a processing advantage for words with multiple meanings (i.e., the “ambiguity advantage” effect). The present study further specifies the source of this advantage by showing that it is based on the extent of meaning relatedness of ambiguous words. Four types of ambiguous words, balanced homonymous (e.g., “panel”), unbalanced homonymous (e.g., “port”), metaphorically polysemous (e.g., “lip”), and metonymically polysemous (e.g., “rabbit”), were used in auditory and visual simple lexical decision experiments. It was found that ambiguous words with multiple related senses (i.e., polysemous words) are processed faster than frequency-matched unambiguous control words, whereas ambiguous words with multiple unrelated meanings (i.e., homonymous words) do not show such an advantage. In addition, a distinction within polysemy (into metaphor and metonymy) is demonstrated experimentally. These results call for a re-evaluation of models of word recognition, so that the advantage found for polysemous, but not homonymous, words can be accommodated.

Understanding words in context: The role of Broca's area in word comprehension

What role does meaning selection play in word comprehension, and what neural systems support this selection process? Most words have multiple meanings and are therefore ambiguous. This is true of both homonymous words (words that have multiple unrelated meanings) and polysemous words (words that have multiple related meanings). The extant evidence indicates that meaning selection is an integral part of homonym comprehension. However, it is not known whether meaning selection extends to polysemous words, or what neural systems support meaning selection during comprehension. Prior neuroimaging and neuropsychological evidence suggest that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) may play a role in resolving competition during language processing. We therefore sought to test the hypotheses that meaning selection is part of polysemous word comprehension, and that the LIFG resolves meaning competition during word comprehension. We tested healthy participants on a version of the triplet lexical decision task, with polysemous and homonymous stimuli. Results suggest that the meanings of polysemous words, like the meanings of homonyms, are selected based on context. However, homonymous and polysemous words differed in how meaning frequency affected meaning selection. We then administered the triplet lexical decision task to patients with LIFG damage to examine whether this region plays a role in context-dependent meaning selection. Results support the hypothesis that the LIFG serves as a top-down biasing mechanism that facilitates rapid meaning selection during word comprehension. We conclude that context-dependent meaning selection is an integral part of word comprehension for both homonyms and polysemous words, and that the LIFG facilitates this selection process.

Aspects of Language in Children With ADHD

This article reports some outcomes from an exploratory study that compares children diagnosed with ADHD and without language impairment with typically developing children for aspects of language use. Discourse analysis based on a systemic functional linguistics approach is applied to spoken and written samples from three different text types that are supplied by 11 children diagnosed with ADHD and 11 typically developing children. Comparisons of multiple variables most often show differences in use between the groups. Closer examination of these differences shows that relative to the controls, the ADHD group uses fewer strategies of textual organization and more avoidance, tangential, and unrelated meanings and more abandoned utterances and spelling and punctuation errors. Clinical implications suggest that careful linguistic analysis of spoken and written language of children with ADHD cannot only identify the linguistic resources they use within everyday contexts but may also indicate areas where intervention may be beneficial.

Children's resistance to homonymy: an experimental study of pseudohomonyms

Research in diachronic linguistics has shown that homonyms are often dispreferred in language. This study proposes that this trend is mirrored in the difficulties that children encounter in mapping homonyms. Two experiments are presented in support of this proposition. In Experiment 1, 16 preschool children (mean age = 4;6) are shown to perform quite well on tasks requiring them to assign novel meanings to nonsense words. They perform poorly, however, on tasks requiring them to assign a different, unrelated meaning to a known word. Experiment 2 (N = 18, mean age = 4;5) shows that preschoolers' performance on this task, however, improves when a known word appears in a syntactic frame that is not appropriate for the word (as when a verb appears in a noun syntactic frame), thereby providing a strong indication that a new meaning is appropriate.

The effects of homonymy and polysemy on lexical access: an MEG study

We examined the neural correlates of semantic ambiguity by measuring changes in MEG recordings during a visual lexical decision task in which the properties of ambiguous words were manipulated. Words that are ambiguous between unrelated meanings (like bark, which can refer to a tree or to a dog) were accessed more slowly than words that have no unrelated meanings (such as cage). In addition, words that have many related senses (e.g., belt, which can be an article of clothing or, closely related in sense, a fan belt used in machinery) were accessed faster than words that have few related senses (e.g., ant). The findings are inconsistent with accounts that posit that both kinds of ambiguity involve separate lexical entries, but instead offer both behavioral and neurophysiological support for separate entry accounts only for homonymy, and a single-entry model of polysemy. The findings also provide neural correlates for a behavioral study of lexical ambiguity that demonstrated that the frequently reported ambiguity advantage in lexical decision tasks is not due to the presence of many unrelated meanings but to the presence of many related senses.

Word Meaning in Academic English: Homography in the Academic Word List

The Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) consists of 570 word families that are frequent and wide ranging in academic texts. It was created by counting the frequency, range, and evenness of spread of word forms in a specially constructed academic corpus. This study examines the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) to see if the existence of unrelated meanings for the same word form (homographs) has resulted in the inclusion of words in the list which would not be there if their clearly different meanings were distinguished. The study shows that only a small proportion of the word families contain homographs, and in almost all cases, one of the members of a pair or group of homographs is much more frequent and widely used than the others. Only three word families (intelligence, offset, and panel) drop out of the list because none of their homographs separately meet the criteria for inclusion in the list. A list of homographs in the AWL is provided, with frequencies for those where each of the members of a homograph pair are reasonably frequent.

Modelling the effects of semantic ambiguity in word recognition

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen-Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] on how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage for words with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high-dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space.

Normes d'association libre et fréquences relatives des acceptions pour 162 mots homonymes

Résumé Les mots homonymes (par exemple, « avocat ») sont largement utilisés dans des expériences en psychologie cognitive afin d'étudier le traitement du langage, la levée des ambiguïtés lexicales et l'organisation en mémoire des représentations lexicales et sémantiques. Ces expériences requièrent le contrôle des relations associatives entre différents stimulus et des fréquences relatives des différentes acceptions des mots homonymes. L'objectif principal des normes d'associations verbales que nous présentons est de permettre aux chercheurs de réaliser de tels contrôles. Chacun des 162 items ambigus a été présenté à 100 sujets dans une tâche d'association libre. La totalité des réponses est présentée, ainsi que la fréquence relative des acceptions estimées à partir de ces normes. Mots clés : normes d'association libre, ambiguïté lexicale, homonymie, fréquence relative des acceptions.

Modelling the effects of semantic ambiguity in word recognition

AbstractMost words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The model performs well on the task of retrieving the different meanings of ambiguous words, and is able to simulate data reported by Rodd, Gaskell, and Marslen‐Wilson [J. Mem. Lang. 46 (2002) 245] on how semantic ambiguity affects lexical decision performance. In particular, the network shows a disadvantage forwords with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g., bark) that coexists with a benefit for words with multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). The ambiguity disadvantage arises because of interference between the different meanings, while the sense benefit arises because of differences in the structure of the attractor basins formed during learning. Words with few senses develop deep, narrow attractor basins, while words with many senses develop shallow, broad basins. We conclude that the mental representations of word meanings can be modelled as stable states within a high‐dimensional semantic space, and that variations in the meanings of words shape the landscape of this space.

Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric

I intend to approach the issue of tradition indirectly by first considering some problems connected with rhetorical agency. This strategy might seem awkward, if not dangerous, since it entangles two equally complex and disputed concepts. Nevertheless, I hope to show that, within the humanistic strand of rhetoric, these concepts are linked in a way that is not currently recognized but has an important bearing on our understanding of both. Specifically, I argue that the humanistic approach entails a productively ambiguous notion of agency that positions the orator both as an individual who leads an audience and as a community member shaped and constrained by the demands of the audience. This tension, I maintain, becomes intelligible when we understand how tradition can function as a mediating force between individual and collective identities, and once viewed from this angle, tradition emerges as the primary resource for rhetorical invention. Before proceeding to this argument, I need to explain the sense in which I am using the term “humanistic,” since humanism, like tradition and agency, is also a concept that carries with it a variety of different and largely unrelated meanings. Consequently, I want to be clear that I am not referring to a kind of secular religion, as in a “religion of humanity,” or to the version of pragmatic philosophy developed by William James and F. S. C. Schiller, or to the ideological formation often called “liberal humanism.” Instead, I have in mind a rather specific development in the history of rhetoric that begins in classical Greece with Protagoras and Isocrates, appears in Rome under the sponsorship of Cicero and Quintilian, rises to prominence again in the Renaissance “humanists,” and still

Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access

There have been several reports in the literature of faster visual lexical decisions to words that are semantically ambiguous. All current models of this ambiguity advantage assume that it is the presence of multiple unrelated meanings that produce this benefit. A set of three lexical decision experiments reported here challenge this assumption. We contrast the ambiguity seen in words like bark, which have multiple unrelated meanings, with words that have multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). In all three experiments we find that while multiple word senses do produce faster responses, ambiguity between multiple meanings delays recognition. These results suggest that, while competition between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words delays their recognition, the rich semantic representations associated with words with many senses facilitate their recognition.

The representation of "false cognates" in the bilingual lexicon.

The results of repetition priming studies with homographs such as BANK suggest that semantic constraints restrict priming to the specific meaning invoked during the study phase. Cross-language priming studies with "false cognates" (words with similar form but unrelated meanings) suggest that form similarity may be sufficient to support repetition priming, and they do not therefore support this claim. The relevant studies have used language cues (e.g., seeing the word ESTATE in the context of other Italian words) as distinct from semantic cues (e.g., INVERNO-ESTATE) to constrain meaning, however, so that interpretation is correspondingly uncertain. The experiment described in this paper was designed to answer this question: Does sequential exposure to the English word pair MANOR-ESTATE during the study phase facilitate lexical decision to the second of these words during sequential exposure to the Italian word pair INVERNO-ESTATE (i.e., winter-summer) during the test phase of the experiment? In the experiment reported below, interpretation of false cognates was constrained by meaning rather than language, and cross-language repetition priming was eliminated for false cognates. The results suggest that lexical representation in bilinguals is organized along morphological lines rather than by language.

Processing ambiguous verbs: evidence from eye movements.

In 2 eye-tracking experiments, participants read verbs that had 2 (unrelated) meanings or 2 (related) senses in contexts that disambiguated before or after the verb, to the dominant or subordinate interpretation. A 3rd experiment used unambiguous verbs. The results indicated that the language processor used information about context in the early stages of resolving meaning ambiguities but only during integration for sense ambiguities. Effects of preference were delayed for both types of verbs. The results contrast with findings concerning the processing of nouns (e.g., K. Rayner & S. A. Duffy, 1986). For meaning ambiguities, the authors argue that delays in resolution allow both meanings to reach a high level of activation, thus reducing effects of frequency. For sense ambiguities, the authors argue that the processor does not access multiple senses but activates one underspecified meaning and uses context to home in on the appropriate sense.

An Integrated Model of Meaning and Sense Activation and Disambiguation

A simulation of meaning and sense selection is presented. In the model, distributed representations are used for both unrelated meanings and related meaning senses; however, related meaning senses are assumed to be correlated. Related meaning senses are assumed to be learned associatively in similarly correlated contexts. Our model is sufficient to account for the contrasting results obtained in priming paradigms by Whitney, McKay, Kellas, and Emerson (1985) and Tabossi (1988).

Systematic Verb Polysemy in MT: A Study of Danish Motion Verbswith Comparisons with Spanish

In this paper we propose a semantic apparatus based on Frame Semantics which enables us to treat the systematic polysemy of Danish motion verbs in a satisfactory way in relation to Machine Translation (MT). Abandoning the strategy applied in more traditional MT systems where related and unrelated meanings are in essence treated alike, i.e. as unrelated, we suggest an approach where relatedness in meaning is expressed via frame element assignments and where systematically derived senses can thus be generated on the basis of prototypical senses. By contrasting Danish data with Spanish, we demonstrate that the identified meaning variations in Danish motion verbs are crucial not only for analysis but also in the transfer phase where deviations in evoked frame elements prove to trigger translations which differ from the ``prototypical'' translations of the relevant verbs.

Fuzziness - vagueness - generality - ambiguity

In this paper, I attempt to distinguish four linguistic concepts: fuzziness, vagueness, generality and ambiguity. The distinction between the four concepts is a significant matter, both theoretically and practically. Several tests are discussed from the perspectives of semantics, syntax and pragmatics. It is my contention that fuzziness, vagueness, and generality are licensed by Grice's Co-operative Principle, i.e. they are just as important as precision in language. It is concluded that generality, vagueness, and fuzziness are under-determined, and ambiguity is over-determined. Fuzziness differs from generality, vagueness, and ambiguity in that it is not simply a result of a one-to-many relationship between a general meaning and its specifications; nor a list of possible related interpretations derived from a vague expression; nor a list of unrelated meanings denoted by an ambiguous expression. Fuzziness is inherent in the sense that it has no clear-cut referential boundary, and is not resolvable with resort to context, as opposed to generality, vagueness, and ambiguity, which may be contextually eliminated. It is also concluded that fuzziness is closely involved with language users' judgments. An important implication of this is that for meaning investigations, an integral approach combining semantics, pragmatics, and psycholinguistics would be more powerful and beneficial.

Why SAFE Is Better Than FAST: The Relatedness of a Word's Meanings Affects Lexical Decision Times

Past lexical decision studies investigating the number of meanings (NOM) effect have produced mixed results. A second variable, the relatedness among a word's meanings, has not been widely studied. In Experiment 1, Relatedness (High or Low), NOM (Many or Few), and nonword condition (legal nonwords or pseudohomophones) were manipulated in lexical decision. No significant effects of NOM or Relatedness were observed in the legal nonword condition. However, in the pseudohomophone condition, Relatedness and NOM both produced significant main effects, and an interaction. Words with few, unrelated meanings produced the slowest response times (RTs); all other words produced statistically equivalent RTs. Results of the pseudohomophone condition of Experiment 1 were replicated in Experiment 2, except the main effect of NOM was not significant. The overall unreliability of NOM effects in these (and previous) experiments lead us to question the contribution of NOM to the observed interaction. NOM metrics are often confounded with relatedness; words with many meanings tend to have highly related meanings. The results show that relatedness among meanings can influence lexical decision performance; the challenge is now to explore alternative measures, other than simple enumeration, to adequately describe word meanings.

Impairments of Lexical-Semantic Processing in Aphasia: Evidence from the Processing of Lexical Ambiguities

Broca′s and Wernicke′s aphasics performed speeded lexical decisions on the third member of auditorily presented triplets consisting of two word primes followed by either a word or a nonword. In three of the four priming conditions, the second prime was a homonym with two unrelated meanings. The relation of the first prime and the target with the two meanings of the homonym was manipulated in the different priming conditions. The two readings of the ambiguous words either shared their grammatical form class (noun-noun ambiguities) or not (noun-verb ambiguities). The silent intervals between the members of the triplets were varied between 100, 500, and 1250 msec. Priming at the shortest interval is mainly attributed to automatic lexical processing, and priming at the longest interval is mainly due to forms of controlled lexical processing. For both Broca′s and Wernicke′s aphasics overall priming effects were obtained at ISIs of 100 and 500 msec, but not at an ISI of 1250 msec. This pattern of results is consistent with the view that both types of aphasics can automatically access the semantic lexicon, but might be impaired in integrating lexical-semantic information into the context. Broca′s aphasics showed a specific impairment in selecting the contextually appropriate reading of noun-verb ambiguities, which is suggested to result from a failure either in the on-line morphological parsing of complex word forms into a stem and an inflection or in the on-line exploitation of the syntactic implications of the inflectional suffix. In a final experiment patients were asked to explicitly judge the semantic relations between a subset of the primes that were used in the lexical decision study. Wernicke′s aphasics performed worse than both Broca′s aphasics and normal controls, indicating a specific impairment for these patients in consciously operating on automatically accessed lexical-semantic information.

Paradigms and perception

In the social psychological threat-compensation literature, there is an apparent contradiction whereby relatively extreme beliefs both decrease markers of physiological arousal following meaning violations, and increase the values affirmation behaviors understood as a palliative responses to this arousal. We hypothesize that this is due to the differential impact of measuring extremism on behavioral inhibition and approach systems following meaning violations, whereby extremism both reduces markers of conflict arousal (BIS) and increases values affirmation (BAS) unrelated to this initial arousal. Using pupil dilation as a proxy for immediate conflict arousal, we found that the same meaning violation (anomalous playing cards) evoked greater pupil dilation, and that this pupillary reaction was diminished in participants who earlier reported extreme beliefs. We also found that reporting extreme beliefs was associated with greater affirmation of an unrelated meaning framework, where this affirmation was unrelated to physiological markers of conflict arousal.

Context, Meaning, and Transfer of Verbal Behavior

Two experiments, with 54 and 60 college Ss, respectively, had paired-associate words varied either in or out of a sentence context in training; had stimulus, response or both S-R similarity varied in 3 lists of paired-associate words or sentences between training and transfer; and had the meaning relationships of words within the 3 lists of paired-associate words or sentences between training and transfer varied in six ways: unrelated, synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, associates, and identical. Both experiments were designed as 2 (context) by 3 (lists) by 6 (meaning) with repeated measures for meaning. In Exp. I, the paired-associate words for the transfer task were not in a sentence context and in Exp. II the same paired-associate words were in a sentence context. The results indicated that there was reliably greater transfer for words that had homonym, associate or identical than unrelated, synonym, or antonym meaning relationships between training and transfer. This was true whether the paired-associate words were in or out of context in training or in transfer. Only when the training and transfer tasks were in context was there more transfer of learning due to context than no context. Contrary to the theory of transfer, there was no difference due to S, R, or S-R similarity being varied between training and transfer.