Authors:

RODD, J., Gaskell, M.G. & MARSLEN-WILSON, W.D.

Reference:

Year of publication:

2002

CBU number:

4188

Abstract:

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 assumethat 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, that have multiple unrelated meanings withwords 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.