Processing Semantic Ambiguity: Different Loci for Meanings and Senses
نویسندگان
چکیده
Semantic ambiguity can occur either as a consequence of ambiguity between unrelated meanings (e.g. bank) or ambiguity between related senses (e.g. hook). Early research did not distinguish between the two, finding that ambiguous words were recognized faster than unambiguous words. More recently it has been shown that words with many meanings suffer from a disadvantage in terms of recognition times, and words with many senses enjoy an advantage over their unambiguous counterparts. We report an auditory lexical decision study in which we apply the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) logic to investigate the loci of the two types of ambiguity, and argue that they operate at different levels in the word recognition system.
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