Disambiguating the ambiguity advantage effect in word recognition: An advantage for polysemous but not homonymous words
Section snippets
The ambiguity advantage effect
Lexical ambiguity, where a single string of letters or phonemes can lead to more than one interpretation, is very common in natural language. Usually, we select one of these different interpretations based on the context in which the ambiguous word occurs. Ambiguous words can also be recognized in isolation. Upon presentation of an ambiguous word in isolation, we are normally able to identify an appropriate meaning and we are often unaware of alternative meanings.
Most research that has compared
The present study
The present study, thus, aims to identify further and clarify the source of the processing advantage found in previous lexical decision studies for words with multiple meanings (i.e., the “ambiguity advantage” effect). Based on the hypothesis that “sense-relatedness” drives the processing advantage in word recognition, the present study, using two simple lexical decision experiments (an auditory and a visual, similar to Rodd et al., 2002), addressed the following question: If
Experiment 1
To investigate the effects of having multiple unrelated meanings (i.e., homonymous words) versus the effects of having multiple related senses (i.e., polysemous words) on word processing, a simple auditory lexical decision task was designed.
Experiment 2
Experiment 2 used the same materials as Experiment 1, but in the visual modality.
General discussion
The present set of studies addressed the issue of whether homonymous ambiguous words (i.e., ambiguous words with multiple unrelated meanings) are processed differently from polysemous ambiguous words (i.e., ambiguous words with multiple related senses) in an attempt to clarify further the so-called “ambiguity advantage” effect in word recognition. Overall, the results supported our hypothesis of a “sense-relatedness advantage” effect, as opposed to an “ambiguity advantage” effect, in that a
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by a McGill Majors Fellowship and a Studentship from the Faculty of Medicine, McGill University to the first author and by a grant from the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche (FCAR, now FQRNT) to the second author. We would like to thank Meg Grant and Erin E. Vensel for their help with testing and the preliminary analysis of the results.
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