Word Meanings and Ambiguity - SM1

Question 1

What is lexical access?

Answer 1

the process of finding and retrieving all the stored knowledge we have about a word, principally its semantic representation (its meaning)

Question 2

In gating experiments, what does context influence?

Answer 2

Recognition point

Question 3

What is the process of a gating experiment?

Answer 3

• read a fragment of a word to participants
• they guess how the word ends
• keep adding more to the word until it is full
• at which point can they confidently distinguish the actual word from its competitors? = Recognition point

Question 4

If context makes recognising words easier, what does this tell us about word recognition processes? (What can’t they be?)

Answer 4

They can’t be serial and autonomous

Question 5

What happens in cross-modal priming?

Answer 5

• If you hear the word ‘captain’ and are presented with a picture of a boat it will help you be faster at recognising the boat
• If you hear the word ‘capital’ and are presented with a picture of some money it will help recognising the money
• If you hear just ‘cap…’ then it will prime both of the images

Question 6

What do cross-modal priming studies show? (2)

Answer 6

• that you briefly activate numerous meanings of potential candidates before you actually identify the word and before it has finished
• there is no hard division between word recognition and meaning activation

Question 7

What is a transient ambiguity?

Answer 7

The ambiguity is resolved by the end of the word

Question 8

How are meanings and senses different?

Answer 8

• different meanings of words are semantically unrelated
• different senses of words are semantically related, but still seperable

Question 9

What did Rodd et al (2022) find when looking at whether ambiguity influences single word activation? (2)

Answer 9

• Recognition is faster for words with many senses and few meanings
• Word recognition is not independent of meaning

Question 10

What type of ambiguity seems to actually be helpful in word identification?

Answer 10

Different senses

Question 11

What are semantic feature models of lexical representation? (4)

Answer 11

• meanings are represented as collections of semantic features
• multiple meanings are incoherent sets of features - conflict needs to be resolved, which takes time
• multiple senses are more coherent sets of features, leads to more flexible representation - some of the features are shared so there is less conflict
• Word recognition involves a meaning resolution process

Question 12

What do theoretical models (of word understanding) all assume?

Answer 12

Sentence context has some influence on meaning selection

Question 13

How do theoretical models (of word understanding) differ?

Answer 13

• When sentence context influences (early, late)
• How it influences (interactive, autonomous)
• Role of meaning frequency

Question 14

What does the multiple access model suggest? (2)

Answer 14

• all meanings accessed in a context-independent way
• contextually appropriate word is chosen from all the accessed words

Question 15

What kind of model is the multiple access model? (3)

Answer 15

• autonomous/modular
• late timing of context effect
• low influence of frequency

Question 16

What does context-guided single-reading lexical access suggest? (2)

Answer 16

• context used to restrict access to only appropriate meaning
• inappropriate meanings never accessed

Question 17

What kind of model is context-guided single-reading lexical access? (3)

Answer 17

• interactive
• early timing of context effect
• low influence of frequency

Question 18

What is cross-modal priming? (3)

Answer 18

• spoken prime word followed by a semantically related target
• make a speeded lexical decision judgement on the target (is it a word or not?)
• provides a measure of meaning activation

Question 19

What are the early effects of context in the ‘bugs’ study? Which model does this fit with?

Answer 19

• target words presented at offset of ambiguous word get priming for both meanings
• context has no effect
• fits with the multiple access model

Question 20

What are the late effects of context in the ‘bugs’ study? Which model does this fit with?

Answer 20

• target words presented 3 syllables later get priming only for appropriate meaning
• context effect occurs after lexical access
• fits with the multiple access model

Question 21

What did Tanenhaus et al (1979) find when looking at how noun/verb ambiguity is resolved with the word ‘watch’? (2)

Answer 21

• initial priming of both interpretations
• later (~200ms) priming of context-appropriate item only

Question 22

What are balanced and unbalanced meaning frequencies?

Answer 22

• balanced = both meanings equally common
• unbalanced = one meaning is dominant

Question 23

What was found when cross-modal priming was used to study context and homonyms (port)? which models do the results support (2)

Answer 23

• subordinate constraining context = equal priming for both targets (multiple access model)
• dominant constraining context = priming for dominant meaning (selective priming)

Question 24

What are subordinate and dominant meanings?

Answer 24

subordinate = less common meaning
dominant = most common meaning

Question 25

What did Lucas (1999) find in a meta-analysis of literature on sentential context effects? What does this suggest?

Answer 25

• small systematic biasing effects across the experiments (so context just biases meaning activation, but doesn’t completely rule out the inappropriate ones)

Question 26

What did Rodd et al (2005) find about people in persistent vegetative state?

Answer 26

some patients are sensitive to high-level distinctions in language comprehension (brain activation)