Haro Juan, Ferré Pilar
Research Center for Behavior Assessment (CRAMC) and Department of Psychology, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Crta. de Valls s/n, Campus Sescelades, 43007, Tarragona, Spain.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2018 Jun;47(3):679-698. doi: 10.1007/s10936-017-9554-3.
It is not clear whether multiple unrelated meanings inhibit or facilitate word recognition. Some studies have found a disadvantage for words having multiple meanings with respect to unambiguous words in lexical decision tasks (LDT), whereas several others have shown a facilitation for such words. In the present study, we argue that these inconsistent findings may be due to the approach employed to select ambiguous words across studies. To address this issue, we conducted three LDT experiments in which we varied the measure used to classify ambiguous and unambiguous words. The results suggest that multiple unrelated meanings facilitate word recognition. In addition, we observed that the approach employed to select ambiguous words may affect the pattern of experimental results. This evidence has relevant implications for theoretical accounts of ambiguous words processing and representation.
目前尚不清楚多个不相关的含义是会抑制还是促进单词识别。一些研究发现在词汇判断任务（LDT）中，具有多个含义的单词相对于明确的单词存在劣势，而其他一些研究则表明这类单词具有促进作用。在本研究中，我们认为这些不一致的发现可能是由于各研究中用于选择歧义单词的方法所致。为解决这一问题，我们进行了三项词汇判断任务实验，在实验中改变了用于区分歧义单词和明确单词的标准。结果表明，多个不相关的含义会促进单词识别。此外，我们观察到用于选择歧义单词的方法可能会影响实验结果模式。这一证据对歧义单词处理和表征的理论解释具有相关意义。
