Jennifer Rodd and Gareth Gaskell and William Marslen-Wilson 2002

Rodd, Jennifer, Gareth Gaskell & William Marslen-Wilson. 2002. Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access. Journal of Memory and Language 46(2). 245 - 266. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.2001.2810.

@article{555310,
  author         = {Jennifer Rodd and Gareth Gaskell and William Marslen-Wilson},
  journal        = {Journal of Memory and Language},
  number         = {2},
  pages          = {245 - 266},
  title          = {Making Sense of Semantic Ambiguity: Semantic Competition in Lexical Access},
  url            = {http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749596X01928104},
  volume         = {46},
  year           = {2002},
  abstract       = {There have been several reports in the literature of faster visual lexical decisions to words that are semantically ambiguous. All current models of this ambiguity advantage assume that it is the presence of multiple unrelated meanings that produce this benefit. A set of three lexical decision experiments reported here challenge this assumption. We contrast the ambiguity seen in words like bark, which have multiple unrelated meanings, with words that have multiple related word senses (e.g., twist). In all three experiments we find that while multiple word senses do produce faster responses, ambiguity between multiple meanings delays recognition. These results suggest that, while competition between the multiple meanings of ambiguous words delays their recognition, the rich semantic representations associated with words with many senses facilitate their recognition.},
  citekeys       = {glossa5108:B39 glossa5325:B55},
  doi            = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1006/jmla.2001.2810},
  inlg           = {English [eng]},
  isreferencedby = {glossa5108 glossa5325},
  keywords       = {lexical ambiguity},
  lgcode         = {Hiw [hiw] (computerized assignment from "ambiguity")},
  src            = {evobib, glossa, langsci}
}