The relationship between sentence comprehension and lexical-semantic retuning
The relationship between sentence comprehension and lexical-semantic retuning
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DOI：
10.1016/j.jml.2020.104188
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发表时间：
2021-02-01
影响因子：
4.3
通讯作者：
Rodd, Jennifer M.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Gilbert, Rebecca A.;Davis, Matthew H.;Rodd, Jennifer M.
在不太常见的含义（例如“莎莉担心球会变得多么拥挤”）的背景下一次遇到模棱两可的单词（例如树皮、球）可能会使该词的后续解释转向相同的从属含义。这种词汇语义重新调整可以提高未来对歧义单词的理解。本文研究了这种学习形式与句子理解过程中发生的具体过程之间的关系。一种可能性是，在初始意义激活和选择期间，词汇语义重新调整在听到歧义词后立即发生，因此当在歧义词之前提供消歧上下文（先消歧义）时，启动应该最强。或者，启动可能与所需的重新解释程度有关，这将预测当单词最初被误解时的最大学习，因为关键上下文是在单词之后给出的（随后的消歧，例如“莎莉担心球会太拥挤。”）。在四项实验中，成年人听了之前和之后的消歧句子，然后测试了他们对引发和未引发的歧义词的解释。结果表明，两种句子类型都可以发生词汇语义重新调整。然而，重要的是，后续消歧句子启动的出现对主要条件敏感：当任务可以在不需要重新分析歧义的情况下执行时，则没有观察到显着的启动。这与语言处理的“足够好”观点是一致的，该观点指出表示可以根据情况的要求保持（不）精确，并且词汇语义重新调整对足够好解释的输出进行操作。更一般地说，我们的研究结果表明，词汇语义重新调整是由参与者在初次相遇期间对单词含义的最终解释驱动的，无论最初的含义激活或误解如何。
A single encounter with an ambiguous word (e.g. bark, ball) in the context of a less-frequent meaning (e.g. "Sally worried about how crowded the ball would be.") can shift the later interpretation of the word toward the same subordinate meaning. This lexical-semantic retuning functions to improve future comprehension of ambiguous words. The present paper investigates the relationship between this form of learning and the specific processes that occur during sentence comprehension. One possibility is that lexical-semantic retuning occurs immediately upon hearing the ambiguous word, during initial meaning activation and selection, so priming should be strongest when the disambiguating context is provided before the ambiguous word (prior disambiguation). Alternatively, priming may relate to the degree of reinterpretation needed, which would predict maximal learning when the word is initially misunderstood because the critical context is given after the word (subsequent disambiguation, e.g. "Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded."). In four experiments, adults listened to prior and subsequent disambiguation sentences, and were later tested on their interpretations of primed and unprimed ambiguous words. The results showed that lexical-semantic retuning can occur for both sentence types. Importantly, however, the emergence of priming for subsequent disambiguation sentences was sensitive to the prime conditions: when the task could potentially be performed without needing to re-analyse the ambiguity, then no significant priming was observed. This is consistent with the 'good enough' view of language processing which states that representations can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation, and that lexical semantic retuning operates on the output of good-enough interpretation. More generally, our findings suggest that lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants' final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation.