Aug 2026· Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology· pp.
17470218261481735
· 0 citations
Medicine
Abstract
Theories of the mental lexicon must explain how people use context to interpret ambiguous words (e.g., "internal organ" vs. "musical organ") and why people vary on this core aspect of comprehension. Theoretical development has been hampered by the lack of reliable tests of disambiguation skill. We introduce a task in which participants hear three-sentence narratives with an ambiguous final word (e.g., "organ") and select the appropriate picture from two alternatives. Experiment 1 (N=197) confirmed the viability of this task using a repeated-measures design optimized for detecting group-level ambiguity effects: participants were slower and less accurate for ambiguous compared with closely matched control items in which the final word was replaced with a similar but unambiguous word, e.g., "piano"). We replicated this ambiguity disadvantage using a less closely matched control condition that was developed for Experiment 2 (N=242) which was optimised to measure variation in disambiguation skill. Experiment 2 confirmed robust variability in accuracy and response time, but measurement reliability ranged from r=.41 to .65, below the conventional r=.70 threshold, and correlations with other cognitive tasks were inconsistent. These results highlight the challenges of adapting complex, repeated-measures experimental paradigms to detect individual differences, and provide a framework for developing and assessing such measures.
In language, word order can be used to help disambiguate the grammatical category (noun, verb, etc.) to which an unfamiliar or ambiguous word belongs. We have recently demonstrated that the order of stimuli impacts how ambiguous stimuli are subsequently categorized, even in a nonlinguistic context. However, it remains possible that participants may linguistically recode these stimuli (i.e., giving abstract shapes ‘names’), such that this effect is still based in the language system. Here, we adapted our previous non-linguistic paradigm assessing the impact of sequence order on categorization, but with the addition of two interference conditions: one interfering with phonological systems of linguistic re-coding, and the other with visuospatial memory. We found that while the non-linguistic, visuospatial interference task had no impact on the sequence categorization effect, the linguistic interference task substantially reduced this effect. These results suggest that even though the task uses nonlinguistic stimuli, participants appeared to recode this information linguistically, and thus that this effect may be a feature of language, rather than a more domain-general cognitive process.
Angelle Antoun, Jacqueline Zhang, Fei Xu et al.· Journal of experimental psyc...· 0 citations
Abstract Sentence processing models posit that syntactic processing difficulty contributes to the processing time of each word (e.g., Lewis & Vasishth, 2005). On the other hand, the E-Z Reader 10 model of eye movements in reading (Reichle et al., 2009) proposes that syntactic processing affects eye movements only when integration of an input word fails. We present two eye movement experiments designed to address this tension. Readers were presented with ungrammatical sentences with a singular subject and a plural verb, but with a plural local noun that often induces an illusion of grammaticality, e.g., *The editor of the magazines are reviewing the articles before publication. After each critical sentence was removed from the screen, the reader made a binary acceptability judgment. When readers rejected the ungrammatical critical sentences, there was also pronounced disruption to incremental reading. However, on the majority of trials readers accepted these sentences, and on those trials the eye movement record revealed only a very small increase in reading time compared to corresponding grammatical sentences; critically, this small effect was entirely explained by the difference between conditions in the lexical surprisal of the verb. Thus, as predicted by E-Z Reader 10, an effect of agreement computation above and beyond the effect of surprisal was in evidence only when agreement computation failed, i.e., the sentence was rejected. We discuss implications for models of incremental sentence processing and reading.
Adrian Staub, Nathan Wolf, Brian Dillon· Open Mind· 0 citations
Most modern studies devoted to the processing of ambiguous information contain in the experiment procedure stimulus material with two possible semantic meanings, leaving out cases where there may be more than two possible meanings. In addition, quite a lot of attention in such studies is devoted to the phenomenon of negative choice and its interpretations, although it is still unclear how to interpret negative choice for two or more non-selected stimulus values. In this study, we made an attempt to differentiate the specifics of processing ambiguous information (if there are more than two semantic meanings) from unambiguous one. Moreover, we tried to clarify how the phenomenon of negative choice manifests itself in relation to alternative categories of choice. We conducted an experiment suggesting the need to make a conscious choice of semantic meaning for ambiguous or unambiguous words, after which it was asked to recall the initial acceptable meanings of the words. Thus, the subject was asked to solve two tasks: the installation task for choosing a semantic meaning and the main task for remembering the presented semantic meanings. The data obtained from the experiment allows us to make a difference in the processing of non-actualized word meanings: although the processing of single-valued and multi-valued meanings requires a similar amount of time, the percentage of errors while remembering multi-valued meanings is significantly higher than single-valued ones. In addition, the data obtained do not allow us to define a clear boundary between the category of negative and positive choice, since no significant differences were found between them within the framework of the proposed experimental procedure. Additionally, it was found out that the mental operations involved in the experimental procedure make it possible to more accurately predict the result of cognitive information processing than the type of information taken as the basis for the stimulus material. The findings may provide valuable contributions to future psychological neurocognitive research.
N. Andriyanova, Kira Borodina, Andrei Chukanov et al.· Vestnik of Saint Petersburg...· 0 citations
Children typically prefer the so-called "basic"-level (e.g., dog) versus narrower subordinate (e.g., dalmatian) meanings in acquisition. Subordinate conjectures are facilitated by contrast; for example, when shown a dalmatian and a corgi each labelled "dax" and "wug," learners take "dax" to mean dalmatian, as opposed to dog. But what is the nature of this effect? On a pragmatic account, contrast is helpful because it highlights a communicative pressure on the speaker to be more informative than usual when describing the target referent, given relevant alternatives. Another possibility, however, is that contrastive forms create a simple lexical heuristic. We raise and test two predictions that follow from the pragmatic, but not the lexical, account: in learning subordinate nouns, children use contrastive information even when there are no competing lexical labels (Exp. 1); furthermore, they consider the speaker's knowledge of contrasting alternatives during word learning, as a fully Gricean rich-computation model expects (Exp. 2). Results support a pragmatic (over a purely lexical) account of subordinate conjectures. Thus subordinate noun learning offers an early demonstration of children's ability to integrate informativeness with the speaker's epistemic state during word learning.
June Choe, Anna Papafragou· Cognitive Psychology· 0 citations
While acoustic details such as voice onset time can be informative as to the identity of a phoneme (e.g., GOAT versus COAT), these details are not always reliable. Fortunately, disambiguating cues can often be found elsewhere, such as the semantic context. Indeed, acoustically ambiguous phonemes can be perceptually biased toward a semantically congruent percept (e.g., “The girl milked the ?OAT,” resulting in the percept GOAT). However, these findings come from well-controlled studies where participants repeatedly attend to specific contrasts produced in isolated sentences by a hyper-articulate speaker, which may limit generalizability to real-world listening tasks. Therefore, the current project aims to reconsider this research question in a more naturalistic listening scenario. A two-speaker referential communication task was used to elicit English discourse about visual scenes. Subsequently, statements containing critical minimal-pair referents were replaced with experimental trials containing acoustic × semantic manipulations. Participants in the current study will be told to listen to the conversation and show they’re paying attention by clicking referents in the on-screen image. Supposedly, their primary task will be to complete intermittent survey items about the speakers’ social communication. In reality, we will use eyetracking to infer their phonological and lexical processing during the embedded trials.
Mel Mallard, Kristin J. Van Engen· Journal of the Acoustical So...· 0 citations
A multimodal gap is revealed in how foundation models express meaning, and how their understanding may not transfer faithfully nor equally across modalities.
Jasin Cekinmez, Addison J. Wu, Raja Marjieh et al.· 0 citations
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