Polysemy vs. homonymy in lexical access and the mental lexicon

Jean-Pierre Koenig (Université de Buffalo)
Polysemy vs. homonymy in lexical access and the mental lexicon

The various meanings associated with a single word form can either be unrelated (in which case one talks of homonymy) or similar (in which case one talks of polysemy). The literature is unclear in whether the two kinds of words are represented in the same way in the mental lexicon. Part of the reason for this uncertainty stems from the fact that experiments exploring this issue do not always control for the joint effect of two critical factors (1) semantic relatedness and (2) meaning dominance (whether the two meanings are equally frequent). In this lecture, I present the results of several experiments that controlled for both factors and use a variety of techniques (continuous priming, masked priming, eye-tracked sentence reading) which suggest that polysemous words share semantic representations in a way homonyms do not.

Diaporama (PDF, 1,3 Mo)

References

• Brocher, Andreas & Jean-Pierre Koenig. 2016. Word meaning frequencies affect negative compatibility effects in masked priming. Advances in Cognitive Psychology 12. 50–66.
• Brocher, Andreas, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Gail Mauner & Stephani Foraker. 2018. About sharing and commitment: the retrieval of biased and balanced irregular polysemes. Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience 33(443-466).
• Collins, Allan & Elizabeth Loftus. 1975. A spreading-activation theory of semantic processing. Psychological Review 82. 407–428.
• Ferreira, Fernanda & Nikole D. Patson. 2007. The ’good enough’ approach to language comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass 1. 71–83.
• Frisson, Steven & Martin Pickering. 1999. The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 25. 1366–1383.
• Klein, Devorah & Gregory Murphy. 2001. The representation of polysemous words. Journal of Memory and Language 42. 259–282.
• Klepousniotou, Ekaterini, Debra Titone & Carolina Romero. 2008. Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 34. 1534–1543.
• McRae, Ken & Michael Jones. 2013. Semantic memory. In Daniel Reisberg (ed.), The oxford handbook of cognitive psychology, 206–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• McRae, Ken, Saman Khalkhali & Mary Hare. 2012. Semantic and associative relations in adolescents and young adults: Examining a tenuous dichotomy. In Valerie F. Reyna, Sandra B. Chapman, Michael R. Dougherty & Jere Confrey (eds.), The adolescent brain: Learning, reasoning, and decision making, 39–66. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
• Sereno, Sara C., Patrick J. O’Donnell & Keith Rayner. 2006. Eye movements and lexical ambiguity resolution: Investigating the subordinate-bias effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 32. 335–350.

Archive des articles (Zip, 11 Mo)