Abstract
Meaning relatedness affects storage of ambiguous words in the mental lexicon: unrelated meanings (homonymy) are stored separately whereas related senses (polysemy) are stored as one large representational entry. We hypothesized that word frequency could have similar effects on storage, with low-frequency words having high representational overlap and high-frequency words having low representational overlap. Participants performed lexical decision or semantic categorization to high- and low-frequency nouns with few and many senses. Results showed a three-way interaction between frequency, task type, and polysemy. Low-frequency words showed a polysemy advantage with lexical decision but a polysemy disadvantage with semantic categorization, whereas high-frequency words showed the opposite pattern. These results confirmed our hypothesis that relatedness and word frequency have similar effects on storage of ambiguous words.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 425-429 |
| Number of pages | 5 |
| Journal | Language cognition and neuroscience |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Early online date | 5 Nov 2015 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2016 |
Bibliographical note
FundingThe reported research and the writing of this paper were sup-ported by a grant awarded by the Graduate School in the College of Life Sciences and Medicine in Aberdeen.
Keywords
- polysemy
- lexical ambiguity
- relatedness
- word frequency
- representational overlap
