Studies of lexical ambiguity resolution in sentential contexts have not sufficiently considered the relatedness among an ambiguous word’s meanings as a predicting factor for semantic activation. To better understand the relation between lexical access and discourse processing and the effect of semantic relatedness on lexical ambiguity resolution, a cross-modal lexical priming experiment focusin...

Lexical ambiguity resolution is the process whereby one meaning of an ambiguous lexical item is activated over an alternative meaning. This paper introduces a preliminary model of lexical ambiguity resolution based on known cortical regions that are activated in this process, including areas of the prefrontal and temporal lobes. Through the interaction of these regions, the model is able to sim...

Lexicon definition is one of the main bottlenecks in the development of new applications in the field of Information Extraction from text. Generic resources (e.g., lexical databases) are promising for reducing the cost of specific lexica definition, but they introduce lexical ambiguity. This paper proposes a methodology for building application-specific lexica by using WordNet. Lexical ambiguit...

Two hypotheses concerning the nature of lexical access, the exhaustive access and the terminating ordered search hypotheses, were examined in two separate studies using a cross modal lexical priming task. In this task, subjects listened to sentences that were biased toward either the primary interpretation (a meaning occurring 75% or more of the time) or a secondary interpretation (a meaning oc...

The M.A. study reported here aimed at examining the processing of isolated lexically ambiguous words in L2 by fluent Polish-English bilinguals. Just as many people speak more then one language (Cook 2002: 22), most words prove to have more than one meaning or sense (Rodd er al. 2004: 90). Consequently, it appears crucial to add the ambiguity factor to the analysis of the lexicon. Indeed, a vari...

The influence of semantic ambiguity on word identification processes was explored in a series of word naming and lexical-decision experiments. There was no reliable ambiguity effect in 2 naming experiments, although an ambiguity advantage in lexical decision was obtained when orthographically legal nonwords were used. No ambiguity effect was found in iexical decision when orthographically illeg...

We tested the effect of local lexical ambiguities while manipulating the type of prosodic boundary at which the ambiguity occurred, using French sentences and participants. We observed delayed lexical access when a local lexical ambiguity occurred within a phonological phrase (consistent with previous research; e.g., [un chat grincheux], containing the potential competitor word chagrin, was pro...