Ambiguity in translation is highly prevalent, and has consequences for second-language learning and for bilingual lexical processing. To better understand this phenomenon, the current study compared the determinants of translation ambiguity across four sets of translation norms from English to Spanish, Dutch, German and Hebrew. The number of translations an English word received was correlated ...

This paper is concerned with two related issues in sentence processing--one methodological and one theoretical. Methodologically, it provides an unconfounded test of the ability of the cross-modal lexical priming task, when used appropriately, to provide detailed evidence about the time-course of antecedent reactivation during sentence processing. Theoretically, it provides a study of the natur...

This paper presents a statistical decision procedure for lexical ambiguity resolution.

In this paper we study the effect of different lexical resources and strategies for selecting synonyms in a lexical simplification system for the Spanish language. The resources used for the experiments are the Spanish EuroWordNet, the Spanish Open Thesaurus and a combination of both. As for the synonym selection strategies, we have used both local and global contexts for word sense disambiguat...

Phonological variation in speech production can neutralize phonemic distinctions. In some cases, the alternations also create lexical ambiguity, as in the sentence “A quick rum picks you up,” where the underlined sequence could be interpreted as either rum or as a place assimilated form of run. Three cross-modal priming experiments examined the perceptual resolution of these ambiguities. In a n...

Productive phonological processes including English coronal place assimilation appear to neutralize some lexical contrasts, and thus pose problems for spoken word recognition. The current work explores two questions: (1) can strong spontaneous assimilation create lexical ambiguity, and (2) how do listeners resolve potential lexical ambiguity. Two form priming experiments explored lexical activa...

Syntactic ambiguity resolution often appears to be guided by the use of lexical constraint information (e. A traditional linguistic framework of discrete syntactic categories can complicate the modeling of such lexical constraints. There is evidence that syntactic ambiguity resolution is exposure-based, i.e. present analyses are innuenced by past experiences (e.g. Mitchell and Cuetos (1991)). A...