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Abstract:
Trueswell and Kim (1998) recently found that syntactic
ambiguity resolution could be influenced by fast-priming with
subcategory information. Specifically, the brief presentation of a
verb that subcategorizes for either an NP or an S-Complement
affects the interpretation of a matrix verb which subcategorizes
for both. In the current study, we show that, like subcategory
information, lexical category information, i.e., part of speech,
can influence lexical ambiguity resolution. This result suggests
that part of speech information is distributed across lexical
representations, functioning as an organizing principle of lexical
knowledge in much the same way as orthography and semantics
similarity.
If lexical category information is distributed across individual
lexical entries, then the presentation of unambiguous noun or verb
primes should influence lexical ambiguity resolution for ambiguous
target words. A sub-set of English words are orthographically
ambiguous between nouns and verbs but phonetically distinct. For
example, the word "convict" has initial stress when it is a noun
(CONvict) but final stress when it is a verb (conVICT). In this
experiment, we explore the hypothesis of whether speaker's
pronunciation, and therefore their lexical selection, of these
ambiguous words is influenced by a noun or verb prime that shares
only lexical category information. Unambiguous noun (e.g. song),
verb (e.g. send) and letter-control (e.g. L) primes were followed
by ambiguous targets (e.g. convict). Primes and targets were
phonologically, semantically and orthographically dissimilar and
ambiguous targets were equally frequent as nouns and verbs.
Participants were instructed to pronounce both prime and target
words as quickly as possible. Since our ambiguous target words have
two possible pronunciations, participants needed to commit to a
lexical category before they could respond. We expected
participants to produce more noun pronunciations following noun
primes and more verb pronunciations following verb primes.
We found that when ambiguous words were preceded by a noun
prime, significantly more noun pronunciations were produced
relative to the verb or letter control prime conditions (58% vs.
48% and 51%, respectively). However, there was no biasing effect
found for verb primes. Thus, the presentation of a word which
shares only lexical category information with the target can
influence a participant's lexical selection, at least for
nouns.
This study shows that lexical category information does
influence lexical ambiguity resolution. Noun primes influenced the
pronunciation, and thus the lexical selection, of orthographically
ambiguous target words. This finding from a word recognition
paradigm is analogous to Trueswell and Kim's (1998) results from a
sentence processing paradigm. The parallel adds additional support
to the claim that lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution use
the same mechanism (MacDonald, 1993). The fact that our results
were asymmetrical between nouns and verbs is not surprising in
light of recent word recognition research that suggests that nouns
and verbs are often processed differently (Deutsch, Frost &
Forster, 1998). Finally, this result adds to the growing body of
experimental evidence from the processing and production
literatures which suggest that grammatical information, such as
lexical category information, is an organizing principle for
lexical knowledge, analogous to form and semantic similarity.
Deutsch, A., Frost, R., & Forster, K. 1998. Verbs and nouns
are organized and accessed differently in the mental lexicon:
Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, & Cognition. 24(5), 1238-1255.
Trueswell, J. & Kim, A. 1998. How to prune a garden path by
nipping it in the bud: Fast priming of verb argument structure.
Journal of Memory & Language 39(1), 102-123.
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