Semantic ambiguity within and across languages: An integrative review

Semantic ambiguity often occurs within a language (e.g., the word “organ” in English means both a body part and a musical instrument), but it can also cross a language boundary, such that a given word form is shared in two languages, but its meanings are different (e.g., the word “angel” means “sting” in Dutch). Bilingual individuals are therefore faced not only with ambiguity in each of their languages, but also with ambiguity across languages. The current review focuses on studies that explored such cross-language ambiguity and examines how the results from these studies can be integrated with what we have learned about within-language ambiguity resolution. In particular, this review examines how interactions of frequency and context manifest themselves in ambiguity that crosses a language boundary and call for the inclusion of language context as a contributing factor. An extension of the monolingual reordered access model (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988 Duffy, S. A., Morris, R. K. and Rayner, K. 1988. Lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 27: 429–446. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is outlined to discuss the interactions between these factors. Furthermore, the effects of the similarity between the two meanings, task differences, and individual differences are explored. This review highlights the need for studies that test within- and cross-language ambiguity in the same individuals before strong conclusions can be made about the nature of interactions between frequency, semantic context, and language context.     

Forgiveness: a review of the theoretical and empirical literature

This paper reviews the published literature addressing forgiveness as a therapeutic issue. The review revealed four major themes. These included: diverse attempts in the literature to define forgiveness; the presentation of models of intervention; resistance among theoreticians and therapists to examine forgiveness as a therapeutic construct, and empirical evidence of forgiveness intervention applied to clinical settings. These theoretical and empirical publications are described and critiqued. An evaluation is made as to the current state of the research, and suggestions for future directions.     

A review of theoretical and empirical advancements

In this article, we review both theoretical and empirical advancements in retirement adjustment research. After reviewing and integrating current theories about retirement adjustment, we propose a resource-based dynamic perspective to apply to the understanding of retirement adjustment. We then review empirical findings that are associated with the key research questions in this literature: (a) What is the general impact of retirement on the individual? and (b) What are the factors that influence retirement adjustment quality? We also highlight important future research directions that may be fruitful for psychologists to pursue in this area.     

The significance of occupations in work careers: An empirical and theoretical review

The central position of occupations in work careers has been a widely accepted position in the study of careers. Furthermore, it has also been commonly believed that most work careers follow the temporal sequence of occupational choice, occupational preparation and training, and occupational entry and retention. An analysis of research findings, however, shows that most individuals do not make stable occupational choices as the first step in their work careers, nor do they show a strong commitment to a particular occupation during their work careers. On the contrary, occupational mobility is far more characteristic of most work careers than occupational stability. One possible explanation of the high rates of occupational mobility is that individuals are responding to opportunities that develop during the course of their careers. As opportunities unfold during work careers, individuals use those opportunities to make future career and occupational choices. Thus, careers may be more accurately considered as a series of responses to a succession of opportunity situations than the effort to realize a predetermined occupational goal.     

Infertility as boundary ambiguity: one theoretical perspective

Infertility as a life event can be understood from a number of conceptual perspectives: a developmental crisis, a grief reaction, a disruption of marital contracts and roles, a crisis of identity, sexuality, and/or values, or a challenge of decision-making processes. Stress theory and the construct of boundary ambiguity can augment the understanding of the crisis of infertility by providing a different approach and unique perspective. It is the hypothesis of this article that the involuntarily childless couple may experience infertility as a stress of boundary ambiguity, that is, not knowing who is in and who is out of the family system. As infertile couples attempt to make the transition to parenthood they may experience the child they wish to have as a family member who is psychologically present but physically absent.     

Complementary and supplementary fit: a theoretical and empirical integration

Complementary and supplementary fit represent 2 distinct traditions within the person-environment fit paradigm. However, these traditions have progressed in parallel but separate streams. This article articulates the theoretical underpinnings of the 2 traditions, using psychological need fulfillment and value congruence as prototypes of each tradition. Using a sample of 963 adult employees ranging from laborers to executives, the authors test 3 alternative conceptual models that examine the complementary and supplementary traditions. Results show that an integrative model dominates the other two, such that both traditions simultaneously predict outcomes in different ways.     

Eponymous verb phrases and ambiguity resolution

To understand eponymous verb phrases such as "do a John Travolta," readers cannot merely select a sense out of a mental lexicon (sense selection). They must create new senses (sense creation) by retrieving salient information from memory. We conducted two experiments to test the hypothesis that these processes of memory retrieval parallel those used for ordinary lexical ambiguities. To prepare for Experiment 1, we gathered readers' interpretations of eponymous verb phrases like "do a John Travolta" to establish dominant and subordinate interpretations. We then wrote story contexts that biased comprehension toward one or the other interpretation. In Experiment 1, paraphrase judgment times were used to demonstrate that dominant meanings are privileged in the sense that they are accessible even when the story creates a subordinate bias. In Experiment 2, this privilege faded somewhat when there was a delay before the paraphrase judgment. We discuss the results with respect to the distinction between sense selection and sense creation.     

Eye centring in portraits: a theoretical and empirical evaluation

Tyler (1998 Nature 392 877) proposed that 'painters centre one eye in portraits', and that this is a hidden aesthetic principle used implicitly by artists and by viewers of portraits. We assess that hypothesis in three related studies: a Monte-Carlo analysis of eye placement in synthetic faces randomly placed within a frame; a survey of eye position in 786 painted portraits from Western art of the past six centuries; and an experimental study in which fifty subjects were asked which of two versions of 60 pairs of portraits they preferred, in only one of which the eye was precisely centred. Taken together, the three studies showed no evidence to support Tyler's hypothesis, and in particular there was no evidence for subjects having an aesthetic preference for a centred eye in portraits. We conclude that one eye tends to be relatively close to the vertical midline because of geometric constraints on the placing of a relatively large object, the head, within a pictorial frame.     

Actions and affordances in syntactic ambiguity resolution

In 2 experiments, eye movements were monitored as participants followed instructions containing temporary syntactic ambiguities (e.g., "Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour"). The authors varied the affordances of task-relevant objects with respect to the action required by the instruction (e.g., whether 1 or both eggs in the visual workspace were in liquid form, allowing them to be poured). The number of candidate objects that could afford the action was found to determine whether listeners initially misinterpreted the ambiguous phrase ("in the bowl") as specifying a location. The findings indicate that syntactic decisions are guided by the listener's situation-specific evaluation of how to achieve the behavioral goal of an utterance.     

Semantic satiation and lexical ambiguity resolution.

This study examines the effects of semantic satiation on lexical ambiguity resolution. On a given trial, participants were presented with a word triad. The first word (e.g., HEART) was presented on average 2.5, 12.5, or 22.5 times, and then participants received 2 new words for relatedness judgments. The first of the two new words was always a homograph (e.g., "ORGAN") and the other word was a related or unrelated pairmate (e.g., "KIDNEY"). In Experiment 1, when blocks of trials were intermixed with concordant (e.g., "HEART-ORGAN-KIDNEY"), discordant (e.g., "PIANO-ORGAN-KIDNEY"), and neutral (e.g., "CEILING-ORGAN-KIDNEY") trials, participants did not produce evidence of semantic satiation. In a second experiment in which only concordant and neutral trials were presented, however, participants did produce evidence of semantic satiation in the concordant condition. Taken together, Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that semantic satiation of the context-appropriate meaning of a homograph may impede ambiguity resolution.     

Lexical organization and competition in first and second languages: computational and neural mechanisms

How does a child rapidly acquire and develop a structured mental organization for the vast number of words in the first years of life? How does a bilingual individual deal with the even more complicated task of learning and organizing two lexicons? It is only until recently have we started to examine the lexicon as a dynamical system with regard to its acquisition, representation, and organization. In this article, I outline a proposal based on our research that takes the dynamical approach to the lexicon, and I discuss how this proposal can be applied to account for lexical organization, structural representation, and competition within and between languages. In particular, I provide computational evidence based on the DevLex model, a self-organizing neural network model, and neuroimaging evidence based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies, to illustrate how children and adults learn and represent the lexicon in their first and second languages. In the computational research, our goal has been to identify, through linguistically and developmentally realistic models, detailed cognitive mechanisms underlying the dynamic self-organizing processes in monolingual and bilingual lexical development; in the neuroimaging research, our goal has been to identify the neural substrates that subserve lexical organization and competition in the monolingual and the bilingual brain. In both cases, our findings lead to a better understanding of the interactive dynamics involved in the acquisition and representation of one or multiple languages.     

The substantive nature of psycholexical personality factors: a comparison across languages

The psycholexical approach to personality structure in American English has led to the Big Five factors. The present study considers whether this result is similar or different in other languages. Instead of placing the usual emphasis on quantitative indices, this study examines the substantive nature of the factors. Six studies in European languages were used to develop a taxonomy of content categories. The English translations of the relevant terms were then classified under this taxonomy. The results support the generality of Big Five Factor III (Conscientiousness). Factors IV (Emotional Stability) and V (Intellect) generally did not cohere. Factors I (Extraversion) and II (Agreeableness) tended to split when this was necessary to produce 5 factors. The analysis was extended to several additional studies.     

Coherence-driven resolution of referential ambiguity: A computational model

We present a computational model that provides a unified account of inference, coherence, and disambiguation. It simulates how the build-up of coherence in text leads to the knowledge-based resolution of referential ambiguity. Possible interpretations of an ambiguity are represented by centers of gravity in a high-dimensional space. The unresolved ambiguity forms a vector in the same space. This vector is attracted by the centers of gravity, while also being affected by context information and world knowledge. When the vector reaches one of the centers of gravity, the ambiguity is resolved to the corresponding interpretation. The model accounts for reading time and error rate data from experiments on ambiguous pronoun resolution and explains the effects of context informativeness, anaphor type, and processing depth. It shows how implicit causality can have an early effect during reading. A novel prediction is that ambiguities can remain unresolved if there is insufficient disambiguating information.     

Lexical ambiguity, semantic context, and visual word recognition.

Some alternative hypotheses about the recognition of ambiguous words are considered. According to the selective-access hypothesis, prior semantic context biases people to access one meaning of an ambiguous word rather than another in lexical memory during recognition. In contrast, the nonselectiveaccess hypothesis states that all meanings of the word are accessed regardless of the context. We tested certain versions of these hypotheses by having students decide whether selected strings of letters were English words. The stimuli included test sequnces of three words in which the second word had two distinct possible meanings, whereas the first and third words were related to these meanings in various ways. When the first and third words were related to the same meaning of the ambiguous second word (e.g., SAVE-BANK-MONEY), the reaction time to recognize the third word decreased. But when the first and third words were related to different meanings of the second word (e.g., RIVER-BANK-MONEY), the reaction time for the third word was not reliably different from a control sequence with unrelated words. These and other data favor the selective-access hypothesis. Selective access to lexical memory is discussed in relation to models of word recognition.     

Lexical ambiguity and the timecourse of attentional allocation in word recognition

In two experiments the allocation of attention during the recognition of ambiguous and unambiguous words was investigated. In Experiment 1, separate groups performed either lexical decision, auditory probe detection, or their combination. In the combined condition probes occurred 90, 180, or 270 ms following the onset of the lexical-decision target. Lexical decisions and probe responses were fastest for ambiguous words, followed by unambiguous words and pseudowords, respectively, which indicated that processing ambiguous words was less attention demanding than unambiguous words or pseudowords. Attention demands decreased across the timecourse of word recognition for all stimulus types. In Experiment 2, one group performed the lexical-decision task alone, whereas another group performed the lexical-decision task during the retention interval of a short-term memory task. The results were consistent with those from Experiment 1 and showed that word recognition is an attention-demanding process and that the demands are inversely related to the number of meanings of the stimulus. These results are discussed with regard to the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., single vs. multiple lexical entries) and the effect of such a structure on attentional mechanisms.     

The role of working memory in syntactic ambiguity resolution: a psychometric approach

In 2 studies, the authors used a combination of psychometric and experimental techniques to investigate the effects of domain-general and domain-specific working memory factors on offline decisions concerning attachment of an ambiguous relative clause. Both studies used English and Dutch stimuli presented to English- and Dutch-speaking participants, respectively. In Study 1, readers with low working memory spans were less likely to use recency strategies for disambiguation than were readers with high spans. This finding is inconsistent with predictions of locality- and resource-based accounts of attachment. Psychometric analyses showed that both domain-specific (verbal) and domain-general working memory accounted for the effect. Study 2 found support for the hypothesis that segmentation strategies imposed during silent reading can account for the counterintuitive relationship. Results suggest that readers with low spans have a greater tendency to break up large segments of text because of their limited working memory, leading to high attachment of the ambiguous relative clause.     

Eye movements and lexical ambiguity resolution: investigating the subordinate-bias effect

Recent debates on lexical ambiguity resolution have centered on the subordinate-bias effect, in which reading time is longer on a biased ambiguous word in a subordinate-biasing context than on a control word. The nature of the control word--namely, whether it matched the frequency of the ambiguous word's overall word form or its contextually instantiated word meaning (a higher or lower frequency word, respectively)--was examined. In addition, contexts that were singularly supportive of the ambiguous word's subordinate meaning were used. Eye movements were recorded as participants read contextually biasing passages that contained an ambiguous word target or a word-form or word-meaning control. A comparison of fixation times on the 2 control words revealed a significant effect of word frequency. Fixation times on the ambiguous word generally fell between those on the 2 controls and were significantly different than both. Results are discussed in relation to the reordered access model, in which both meaning frequency and prior context affect access procedures.