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Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives

Fluent language comprehension requires people to rapidly activate and integrate context-appropriate word meanings. This process is challenging for meanings of ambiguous words that are comparatively lower in frequency (e.g., the “bird” meaning of “crane”). Priming experiments have shown that recent e...

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Autores principales: Blott, Lena M., Hartopp, Oliver, Nation, Kate, Rodd, Jennifer M.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9587715/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36281360
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14070
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author Blott, Lena M.
Hartopp, Oliver
Nation, Kate
Rodd, Jennifer M.
author_facet Blott, Lena M.
Hartopp, Oliver
Nation, Kate
Rodd, Jennifer M.
author_sort Blott, Lena M.
collection PubMed
description Fluent language comprehension requires people to rapidly activate and integrate context-appropriate word meanings. This process is challenging for meanings of ambiguous words that are comparatively lower in frequency (e.g., the “bird” meaning of “crane”). Priming experiments have shown that recent experience makes such subordinate (less frequent) word meanings more readily available at the next encounter. These experiments used lists of unconnected sentences in which each ambiguity was disambiguated locally by neighbouring words. In natural language, however, disambiguation may occur via more distant contextual cues, embedded in longer, connected communicative contexts. In the present experiment, participants (N = 51) listened to 3-sentence narratives that ended in an ambiguous prime. Cues to disambiguation were relatively distant from the prime; the first sentence of each narrative established a situational context congruent with the subordinate meaning of the prime, but the remainder of the narrative did not provide disambiguating information. Following a short delay, primed subordinate meanings were more readily available (compared with an unprimed control), as assessed by responses in a word association task related to the primed meaning. This work confirms that listeners reliably disambiguate spoken ambiguous words on the basis of cues from wider narrative contexts, and that they retain information about the outcome of these disambiguation processes to inform subsequent encounters of the same word form.
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spelling pubmed-95877152022-10-23 Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives Blott, Lena M. Hartopp, Oliver Nation, Kate Rodd, Jennifer M. PeerJ Neuroscience Fluent language comprehension requires people to rapidly activate and integrate context-appropriate word meanings. This process is challenging for meanings of ambiguous words that are comparatively lower in frequency (e.g., the “bird” meaning of “crane”). Priming experiments have shown that recent experience makes such subordinate (less frequent) word meanings more readily available at the next encounter. These experiments used lists of unconnected sentences in which each ambiguity was disambiguated locally by neighbouring words. In natural language, however, disambiguation may occur via more distant contextual cues, embedded in longer, connected communicative contexts. In the present experiment, participants (N = 51) listened to 3-sentence narratives that ended in an ambiguous prime. Cues to disambiguation were relatively distant from the prime; the first sentence of each narrative established a situational context congruent with the subordinate meaning of the prime, but the remainder of the narrative did not provide disambiguating information. Following a short delay, primed subordinate meanings were more readily available (compared with an unprimed control), as assessed by responses in a word association task related to the primed meaning. This work confirms that listeners reliably disambiguate spoken ambiguous words on the basis of cues from wider narrative contexts, and that they retain information about the outcome of these disambiguation processes to inform subsequent encounters of the same word form. PeerJ Inc. 2022-10-19 /pmc/articles/PMC9587715/ /pubmed/36281360 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14070 Text en ©2022 Blott et al. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Neuroscience
Blott, Lena M.
Hartopp, Oliver
Nation, Kate
Rodd, Jennifer M.
Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
title Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
title_full Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
title_fullStr Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
title_full_unstemmed Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
title_short Learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
title_sort learning about the meanings of ambiguous words: evidence from a word-meaning priming paradigm with short narratives
topic Neuroscience
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9587715/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/36281360
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.14070
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