Tag: Word Meaning Priming

Publications

New paper out: Listening to Radio 4 or going rowing changes access to words meanings

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Rowing at the 1988 Summer Olympics. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Several members of the Rodd Lab have recently published an open access article entitled “The impact of recent and long-term experience on access to word meanings: Evidence from large-scale internet-based experiments” in the Journal of Memory and Language.  In a set of large (N=2013) web-based experiments we show how hearing ambiguous words on the radio or while attending a rowing club can change how you later process these words.

Abstract:

Many word forms map onto multiple meanings (e.g., “ace”). The current experiments explore the extent to which adults reshape the lexical–semantic representations of such words on the basis of experience, to increase the availability of more recently accessed meanings. A naturalistic web-based experiment in which primes were presented within a radio programme (Experiment 1; N = 1800) and a lab-based experiment (Experiment 2) show that when listeners have encountered one or two disambiguated instances of an ambiguous word, they then retrieve this primed meaning more often (compared with an unprimed control condition). This word-meaning priming lasts up to 40 min after exposure, but decays very rapidly during this interval. Experiments 3 and 4 explore longer-term word-meaning priming by measuring the impact of more extended, naturalistic encounters with ambiguous words: recreational rowers (N = 213) retrieved rowing-related meanings for words (e.g., “feather”) more often if they had rowed that day, despite a median delay of 8 hours. The rate of rowing-related interpretations also increased with additional years’ rowing experience. Taken together these experiments show that individuals’ overall meaning preferences reflect experience across a wide range of timescales from minutes to years. In addition, priming was not reduced by a change in speaker identity (Experiment 1), suggesting that the phenomenon occurs at a relatively abstract lexical–semantic level. The impact of experience was reduced for older adults (Experiments 1, 3, 4) suggesting that the lexical–semantic representations of younger listeners may be more malleable to current linguistic experience.

Authors:

Jennifer M. Rodd, , Zhenguang G. Cai, Hannah N. Betts, Betsy Hanby, Catherine Hutchinson, Aviva Adler

Keywords:

Semantic ambiguity; Lexical ambiguity; Perceptual learning; Priming; Comprehension; Web-based experiment

Publications

Recent Experience with Words Affects Later Processing in another Language

EPwebsite

In a just-published experiment, we have shown that recent experience with a word in your first language affects how you process that same word some time later in your second language. What’s more, whether this recent experience has a positive or negative effect depends on whether that word has the same or a different meaning in the two languages. Our participants read sentences in their first language, Dutch, that contained words like “film”, which has a similar meaning in both languages, and words like “room”, which confusingly means “cream” in Dutch. When the participants were later asked to decide whether these words were real English words, they were faster with words like “film”, but slower for words like “room”. These results show that the representations of words from different languages are strongly interconnected, and that whenever bilinguals switch between languages, this will influence how easily they can process certain words.

Recent experience with cognates and interlingual homographs in one language affects subsequent processing in another language.

Authors: Eva Poort, Jane Warren and Jennifer Rodd

Keywords: Lexical decision; Cognates; Interlingual homographs; Language switching; Word-meaning priming

Conference

Word Lab Poster at Psycholinguistics in Flanders Conference

Eva will be presenting a poster about her research at the Psycholinguistics in Flanders 2015 conference in Marche En Famenne, Belgium on 21st-22nd May.

The title and a link to the poster can be found below:

‘Processing of cognates and interlingual homographs in L2 is affected by recent experience with these words in L1’ – Eva Poort, Jane Warren and Jennifer Rodd.