Polysemy in Sentence Comprehension: Effects of Meaning Dominance
| Autor: | Stephani Foraker, Gregory L. Murphy |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2012 |
| Předmět: |
Linguistics and Language
media_common.quotation_subject Experimental and Cognitive Psychology Context (language use) Meaning (non-linguistic) Language and Linguistics Linguistics Psycholinguistics Article Neuropsychology and Physiological Psychology Reading comprehension Artificial Intelligence Reading (process) Selection (linguistics) Polysemy Psychology Sentence media_common |
| Zdroj: | Journal of memory and language. 67(4) |
| ISSN: | 0749-596X |
| Popis: | Words like church are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another view, readers retrieve one or more specific senses. In a reading task, context that was neutral or biased towards a particular sense preceded a polysemous word. Disambiguating material consistent with only one sense followed, in a second sentence (Experiment 1) or the same sentence (Experiments 2 and 3). Reading the disambiguating material was faster when it was consistent with that context, and dominant senses were committed to more strongly than subordinate senses. Critically, following neutral context, the continuation was read more quickly when it selected the dominant sense, and the degree of sense dominance partially explained the reading time advantage. Similarity of the senses also affected reading times. Across experiments, we found that sense selection may not be completed immediately following a polysemous word but is completed at a sentence boundary. Overall, the results suggest that readers select an individual sense when reading a polysemous word, rather than a core meaning. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
| Externí odkaz: |
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