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The advantages and disadvantages of semantic ambiguity
Authors:
RODD, J., Gaskell, M.G. & MARSLEN-WILSON, W.D.
Reference:
Gleitman, L.R.,& Joshi, A.K. (Eds), Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 405 - 410, Mahwah, New Jersey, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Year of publication:
2000
CBU number:
4179
Abstract:
There have been several reports of faster lexical decisions for words that have many meanings (e.g., ring) compared with words with few meanings (e.g., hotel). However, it is not clear whether this advantage for ambiguous words arises because they have multiple unrelated meanings, or because they have a large number of highly related word senses. All current accounts of the ambiguity advantage assume that it is unrelated meanings that produce the processing benefit. We report two experiments that challenge this assumption; in visual and auditory lexical decision experiments we found that while multiple senses did produce faster responses, multiple meanings produced a disadvantage. We discuss how models of word recognition could accommodate this new pattern of results.
