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Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach
Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and have demonstrated ambiguity advantages in both naming and lexical decision t...
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
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Springer US
2017
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267517/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29124717 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4 |
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author | Chang, Ya-Ning Lee, Chia-Ying |
author_facet | Chang, Ya-Ning Lee, Chia-Ying |
author_sort | Chang, Ya-Ning |
collection | PubMed |
description | Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and have demonstrated ambiguity advantages in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how the various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed the contextual diversity (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, Psychological Science, 17; 814–823, 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman, Lambon Ralph, & Rogers, Behavior Research Methods, 45; 718–730, 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the present semantic space. We then derived a novel ambiguity measure, namely semantic variability, by computing the distance properties of the distinct clusters grouped by the contexts that contained a given word. We demonstrated that semantic variability was superior to semantic diversity in accounting for the variance in naming response times, suggesting that considering the substructure of the various contexts associated with a given word can provide a relatively fine scale of ambiguity information for a word. All of the context and ambiguity measures for 2,418 Chinese single-character words are provided as supplementary materials. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-6267517 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2017 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-62675172018-12-11 Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach Chang, Ya-Ning Lee, Chia-Ying Behav Res Methods Article Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and have demonstrated ambiguity advantages in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how the various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed the contextual diversity (Adelman, Brown, & Quesada, Psychological Science, 17; 814–823, 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman, Lambon Ralph, & Rogers, Behavior Research Methods, 45; 718–730, 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the present semantic space. We then derived a novel ambiguity measure, namely semantic variability, by computing the distance properties of the distinct clusters grouped by the contexts that contained a given word. We demonstrated that semantic variability was superior to semantic diversity in accounting for the variance in naming response times, suggesting that considering the substructure of the various contexts associated with a given word can provide a relatively fine scale of ambiguity information for a word. All of the context and ambiguity measures for 2,418 Chinese single-character words are provided as supplementary materials. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Springer US 2017-11-09 2018 /pmc/articles/PMC6267517/ /pubmed/29124717 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4 Text en © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. |
spellingShingle | Article Chang, Ya-Ning Lee, Chia-Ying Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach |
title | Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach |
title_full | Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach |
title_fullStr | Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach |
title_full_unstemmed | Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach |
title_short | Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach |
title_sort | semantic ambiguity effects on traditional chinese character naming: a corpus-based approach |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6267517/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29124717 http://dx.doi.org/10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4 |
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