Disparate semantic ambiguity effects from semantic processing dynamics rather than qualitative task differences
Blair C. Armstrong & David C. Plaut (2016) Disparate semantic ambiguity effects from semantic processing dynamics rather than qualitative task differences, Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31:7, 940-966, DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2016.1171366
Laburpena
A core challenge in the semantic ambiguity literature is understanding why the number and
relatedness among a word’s interpretations are associated with different effects in different
tasks. An influential account (Hino et al., 2006) attributes these effects to qualitative differences
in the response system. We propose instead that these effects reflect changes over time in
settling dynamics within semantics. We evaluated the accounts using a single task, lexical
decision, thus holding the overall configuration of the response system constant, and
manipulated task difficulty – and the presumed amount of semantic processing – by varying
nonword wordlikeness and stimulus contrast. We observed that as latencies increased, the
effects generally (but not universally) shifted from those observed in standard lexical decision to
those typically observed in different tasks with longer latencies. These results highlight the
importance of settling dynamics in explaining many ambiguity effects, and of integrating
theories of semantic dynamics and response systems.