AMBIGUITY: LEXICAL

Ambiguity at word level, as represented in a sentence such as Tick the right box. Early experiments discovered that subjects’ reactions were slower immediately after reading an ambiguous word. This suggested that the processing of ambiguous words demands additional attentional resources because two senses of the word are activated rather than just one.

 An important question is what happens when a potentially ambiguous word is disambiguated by the context in which it appears (Turn to the right). One view is that context influences the processing of the word, so that we only access the appropriate sense. The other, which has rather more evidence to support it, is that we cannot help but activate both senses. A much-quoted experiment (Swinney, 1979) indicated that hearing the word BUG triggered associations with both possible meanings (insect and spy gadget), even when the word occurred in transparent contexts.

 A second issue is whether all interpretations of an ambiguous word are treated equally. Compare, for example, a balanced homonym such as RIGHT, where both words are highly frequent, with a polarised one such as SCALE, where the dominant sense refers to a set of numbers but a secondary one refers to a characteristic of a fish. Experiments have examined how readers process sentences where polarised homonyms are used in their secondary senses; they indicate that reading slows down even when there is a disambiguating context. This suggests that multiple meanings of words are activated in parallel, with priority given to the dominant one.

See also: Ambiguity: syntactic, Context effects

Further reading: Simpson (1994)

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The dictionary view

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The encyclopaedic view of meaning

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Semantic structure

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