Blott, Lena M;
Hartopp, Oliver;
Nation, Kate;
Rodd, Jennifer M;
(2022)
Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives.
PeerJ
, 10
, Article e14070. 10.7717/peerj.14070.
Preview |
Text
peerj-14070.pdf - Published Version Download (2MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Fluent language comprehension requires people to rapidly activate and integrate context-appropriate word meanings. This process is challenging for meanings of ambiguous words that are comparatively lower in frequency (e.g., the "bird" meaning of "crane"). Priming experiments have shown that recent experience makes such subordinate (less frequent) word meanings more readily available at the next encounter. These experiments used lists of unconnected sentences in which each ambiguity was disambiguated locally by neighbouring words. In natural language, however, disambiguation may occur via more distant contextual cues, embedded in longer, connected communicative contexts. In the present experiment, participants (N = 51) listened to 3-sentence narratives that ended in an ambiguous prime. Cues to disambiguation were relatively distant from the prime; the first sentence of each narrative established a situational context congruent with the subordinate meaning of the prime, but the remainder of the narrative did not provide disambiguating information. Following a short delay, primed subordinate meanings were more readily available (compared with an unprimed control), as assessed by responses in a word association task related to the primed meaning. This work confirms that listeners reliably disambiguate spoken ambiguous words on the basis of cues from wider narrative contexts, and that they retain information about the outcome of these disambiguation processes to inform subsequent encounters of the same word form.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.7717/peerj.14070 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14070 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2022 Blott et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Contextual cues, Language comprehension, Lexical ambiguity, Priming |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10158604 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
