Word Disambiguation Research Articles

Processing lexical ambiguity and visual word recognition in a deep orthography.

We investigated the effect of semantic and phonemic ambiguity on lexical decision and naming performance in the deep Hebrew orthography. Experiment 1 revealed that lexical decisions for ambiguous consonant strings are faster than those for any of the high- or low-frequency voweled alternative meanings of the same strings. These results suggested that lexical decisions for phonemically and semantically ambiguous Hebrew consonant strings are based on the ambiguous orthographic information. However, a significant frequency effect for both ambiguous and unambiguous words suggested that if vowels are present, subjects do not ignore them completely while making lexical decisions. Experiment 2 revealed that naming low-frequency voweled alternatives of ambiguous strings took significantly longer than naming the high-frequency alternatives or the unvoweled strings without a significant difference between the latter two string types. Voweled and unvoweled unambiguous strings, however, were named equally fast. We propose that semantic and phonological disambiguation of unvoweled words in Hebrew is achieved in parallel to the lexical decision, but is not required by it. Naming Hebrew words usually requires a readout of phonemic information from the lexicon.

The contextual disambiguation of a polysemous word in an unattended message

Multimode theories of attention state that an unattended message is analysed at a semantic level, although less efficiently than an attended message. This experiment was designed to test this. A stimulus (the polysemous word ‘bank’) was presented to subjects in the attended and unattended messages of a dichotic task. One meaning of the word ‘bank’ had previously been associated with electric shock in a context which indicated that the appropriate meaning was a clearing bank (money bank).Specifically, a less efficient analysis of the unattended message would predict that the level of GSR activity would be greatest after the presentation of ‘money bank’ in the attended message, less after presentation of ‘money bank’ in the unattended message, even less after presentation of ‘river bank’ in the unattended message and the lowest level of GSR activity should follow the presentation of ‘river bank’ in the attended message. This prediction was confirmed.

Factors contributing to the recovery of monosyllabic words excerpted from natural speech

Words isolated from running speech have been found to be less intelligible than when they appear in the context of a sentence or phrase. Although auditory context, in general, provides additional information, the role of the immediately adjacent acoustic cues is unknown. In this investigation two adult males read in a comfortable manner 16 paragraphs from which a target sentence and a target word (CVC or CVCC) were excised. The words preceding and following each target word were selected so that the initial and final consonant were bounded by a shwa vowel. The intelligibility of the target word was essentially unaffected by the inclusion of the neighboring shwa vowels and only moderately increased by the inclusion of the immediately preceding and following words. Errors in intelligibility were ordered as follows: final consonant, vowel and initial consonant. It was concluded that tempo and spectral normalization, and linguistic expectancy disambiguate words which are initiated and terminated by obstruents and bounded by a vowel.