This work, led by Becky Gilbert explores the learning mechanisms by which lexical-semantic knowledge about the relatively likelihoods of the alternative meanings of ambiguous words is updated. Our findings suggest that this form of lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants’ final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation.
See here for a fab twitter thread that summarises the key message.
Gilbert, R.A., Davis, M.H., Gaskell, M.G., Rodd, J.M. (2021) The relationship between sentence comprehension and lexical-semantic retuning. Journal of Memory and Language 116, 104188DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2020.104188
The Word Lab at UCL 