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On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load

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Abstract

Most research supports a non-selective (or exhaustive) account of activation whereby multiple meanings of a word are initially activated (Degani and Tokowicz Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1266-1303, 2010). But what happens to the non-selected meaning of an ambiguous word (e.g., bark) and how is the decision made to select one meaning over the other? A great deal of research by Gernsbacher and colleagues (e.g., Gernsbacher and Faust 1991a) suggests that the non-selected meaning is “discarded” via active suppression. The present paper examines meaning-selection in ambiguous words using a word to elicit meaning context (rather than a sentence). Additionally, a manipulation of cognitive load (Experiment 2) was employed to examine these processes. Results support a suppression account of meaning selection. An updated conceptualization of ambiguity resolution is proposed.

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Notes

  1. We re-ran all of our analyses using linear mixed-effects models with crossed participant and item random effects (Baayen, Davidson, and Bates 2008). All effects reported significant in the current study were also significant in these mixed-effects models, with the exception of the three-way interaction in Experiment 2 (which became marginal, p = .073).

  2. We performed all 6 possible pairwise comparisons (3 for the load condition and 3 for the no load condition).

  3. We conducted a third experiment manipulating perceptual focus (presenting the context-biasing word during the judgment task in uppercase letters). We intended to examine the effects of deeper processing on ambiguity resolution, but results seemed to indicate that our manipulation of focus was unsuccessful. However, the same pattern was observed as in Experiment 1 with priming for the congruent and incongruent conditions and significantly different levels of activation in these conditions.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the first author’s dissertation committee members (Pat Siple, Margo Bowman and Kate Paesani) for their valuable input and support during this project.

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Correspondence to Lynne N. Kennette.

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Kennette, L.N., Wurm, L.H. On the Disambiguation of Meaning and the Effect of Cognitive Load. Curr Psychol 35, 295–308 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-014-9294-6

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