Lexical ambiguity resolution across languages: a theoretical and empirical review

Words that involve completely different meanings across languages but possess significant overlap in form are referred to as homographic noncognates or interlexical homographs (e.g., red is a color word in English but means "net" in Spanish). An important question in the investigation of the processing of these words is whether or not both meaning and form are integral to their representation leading to language-specific processing of these items. In contrast, some theories have been put forth indicating that the processing of these words is nonselective with regards to language. Simply stated, when one of these words is encountered, all of the relevant meanings are accessed regardless of the specific demands of the task and the base language that is being used. In the present, critical review, evidence purported to favor each view is presented along with a discussion of the methodological and analytic constraints that moderate the reported findings. The data lead to the conclusion that there is a time course involved in the activation of multiple meanings such that a primary or dominant meaning (sometimes biased by frequency) is typically accessed more readily, followed by the opposite language meaning. These results indicated that studies should focus on manipulating the timing intervals between the presentation of these words and subsequent responses that are required by a particular task.     

Sound to meaning correspondences facilitate word learning

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this arbitrariness assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking monolinguals learned meanings for Japanese words in a vocabulary-learning task. Spoken Japanese words were paired with English meanings that: (1) matched the actual meaning of the Japanese word (e.g., “hayai” paired with fast); (2) were antonyms for the actual meaning (e.g., “hayai” paired with slow); or (3) were randomly selected from the set of antonyms (e.g., “hayai” paired with blunt). The results showed that participants learned the actual English equivalents and antonyms for Japanese words more accurately and responded faster than when learning randomly paired meanings. These findings suggest that natural languages contain non-arbitrary links between sound structure and meaning and further, that learners are sensitive to these non-arbitrary relationships within spoken language.     

Living in several languages: implications for therapy

Bilingualism and multilingualism have mainly been neglected in psychotherapy. This paper is based on qualitative research of subjective experiences of living in more than one language, using a combined grounded theory and discursive approach, which raises significant issues for therapy. These individuals experience themselves very differently in their different languages, and construct their languages differently. Languages acquire meanings in socio-political contexts as well as in local personal ones, and encode different concepts and notions of personhood. Issues of language choice within families and what it is seen to accomplish are discussed. Mothers and fathers view this issue differently. The paper argues for the importance of taking into account the differences languages bring for individuals, particularly in the context of colonialism and racism. Asking about families' experiences of their languages is a fruitful way to explore cultural meanings. Multilingualism is a resource for mental flexibility and creativity, but there are challenges in enabling living with its multiplicities.     

The QWERTY Effect: How typing shapes the meanings of words.

The QWERTY keyboard mediates communication for millions of language users. Here, we investigated whether differences in the way words are typed correspond to differences in their meanings. Some words are spelled with more letters on the right side of the keyboard and others with more letters on the left. In three experiments, we tested whether asymmetries in the way people interact with keys on the right and left of the keyboard influence their evaluations of the emotional valence of the words. We found the predicted relationship between emotional valence and QWERTY key position across three languages (English, Spanish, and Dutch). Words with more right-side letters were rated as more positive in valence, on average, than words with more left-side letters: the QWERTY effect. This effect was strongest in new words coined after QWERTY was invented and was also found in pseudowords. Although these data are correlational, the discovery of a similar pattern across languages, which was strongest in neologisms, suggests that the QWERTY keyboard is shaping the meanings of words as people filter language through their fingers. Widespread typing introduces a new mechanism by which semantic changes in language can arise.     

The University Of Colorado Meaning Norms

There exist surprisingly few normative lists of word meanings even though homographs—words having single spellings but two or more distinct meanings—are useful in studying memory and language. The meaning norms that are available all have one or more weaknesses, including: (1) the collection of free associates rather than meanings as responses to the stimulus words; (2) the collection of single rather than multiple responses to the stimulus words; (3) the inclusion of only the two most frequently occurring meaning categories, rather than all meaning categories, for the stimulus words; (4) omission of the responses typical of each meaning category; (5) inadequate randomization of the presentation order of the stimulus words; and (6) unpaced presentation of the stimulus words. We have compiled meaning norms for 90 common English words of low, medium, and high concreteness using a methodology designed to correct these weaknesses. Analysis showed that words of medium concreteness have significantly more first-response meanings than do words of either low or high concreteness, lending support to the view that concreteness is a categorical, rather than a continuous, semantic attribute.     

The odd effect and multiple meanings in English of the words "odd" and "even"

Under a variety of conditions, people take longer to make judgments about odd than about even digits and digit names. In English the words "odd" and "even" have multiple meanings. Perhaps the multiple meanings of these words are responsible for the slowing of responses to odd stimuli. This hypothesis was tested using participants who spoke no English and in whose native language, Polish, the words for the mathematical concepts of odd and even do not have multiple meanings.     

Why is number word learning hard? Evidence from bilingual learners

Young children typically take between 18 months and 2 years to learn the meanings of number words. In the present study, we investigated this developmental trajectory in bilingual preschoolers to examine the relative contributions of two factors in number word learning: (1) the construction of numerical concepts, and (2) the mapping of language specific words onto these concepts. We found that children learn the meanings of small number words (i.e., one, two, and three) independently in each language, indicating that observed delays in learning these words are attributable to difficulties in mapping words to concepts. In contrast, children generally learned to accurately count larger sets (i.e., five or greater) simultaneously in their two languages, suggesting that the difficulty in learning to count is not tied to a specific language. We also replicated previous studies that found that children learn the counting procedure before they learn its logic – i.e., that for any natural number, n, the successor of n in the count list denotes the cardinality n + 1. Consistent with past studies, we found that children’s knowledge of successors is first acquired incrementally. In bilinguals, we found that this knowledge exhibits item-specific transfer between languages, suggesting that the logic of the positive integers may not be stored in a language-specific format. We conclude that delays in learning the meanings of small number words are mainly due to language-specific processes of mapping words to concepts, whereas the logic and procedures of counting appear to be learned in a format that is independent of a particular language and thus transfers rapidly from one language to the other in development.     

维-汉-英三语者三种语言语义通达模型的实验研究

以维吾尔族大学生为研究对象,采用跨语言启动条件下的真假词汇判断任务,变换启动词与目标词的关系类型和语言种类,考察了L2—L1、L3—L1、L3—L2等三种语言词汇之间的语义通达模式。结果发现,维-汉-英三语者的三种语言词汇之间的联结模式为熟练的第二语言词汇是直接通达语义;而非熟练的第三语言词汇既借助母语词汇又借助汉语词汇来通达语义。除此之外,被试的外语熟练水平和语言间的相似性是影响外语词汇通达语义的主要原因。     

Logical operations and iterated infinitely deep languages

We discuss an abstract notion of a logical operation and corresponding logics. It is shown that if all the logical operations considered are implicitely definable in a logic ?*, then the same holds also for the logic obtained from these operations. As an application we show that certain iterated forms of infinitely deep languages are implicitely definable in game quantifier languages. We consider also relations between structures and show that Karttunen's characterization of elementary equivalence for the ordinary infinitely deep languages can be generalized to hold for the iterated infinitely deep languages. An early version of this work was presented in the Abstracts Section of ICM '78.     

Bioethics and the breakdown of the bicameral mind: Sacks and Luria revisited

Since antiquity, individuals have attempted to relate mental processes to circumscribed areas of the brain. In 1935 the neurologist Wilder Penfield purported to know, "the humming of the mind's machinery, and where words come from," after he electrically stimulated areas of the exposed human cortex. Recent theories have suggested a functional separation of the dominant and the nondominant hemispheres, the right brain/left brain concept of thought and personality. One author has even proposed that human consciousness and modern civilization developed when the bicameral mind broke down, and the left brain achieved mastery over the right nondominant temporal lobe. Compared to these mechanistic approaches to brain function and human personality, the Russian neurologist, A.R. Luria and his American follower, Oliver Sacks, have developed a more intellectually satisfying and clinically useful approach which relies on a fuller understanding of the doctor-patient....     

Ladies and Gentlemen, Women and Men: A Study of the Connotations of Words Indicating Gender

Lakoff's hypothesis about the connotations of the words "lady" and "woman" was investigated by asking college students to rate these words, as well as the masculine words "gentleman" and "man", on several adjective scales. Ratings indicated that the term "gentleman" implied greater competence and warmth than the word "man", while the term "lady" tended to suggest to raters relatively less competence and less warmth than the term "woman" did. Further, it was found that the more formal term ("gentleman", "lady") regardless of gender was described more positively than the less formal term ("man", "woman") on several scales concerned with goodness, politeness, morality, and femininity. Lakoff's hypothesis that "lady" conveys some unique meanings relative to sex role stereotypes thus received support, although some of the connotations of "lady" appear to be due to implied formality rather than to gender features. The degree to which feminine terms were differentiated by raters could be predicted to some extent on the basis of rater characteristics; no significant prediction was possible for the masculine terms.     

The colourless canvas: representation, therapeutic action and the creation of mind

Freud's initial formulations viewed psychoanalysis as working towards the rediscovery of psychic elements - thoughts, feelings, memories, wishes, etc. - that were once known - represented in the mind, articulatable, thinkable - but then disguised and/or barred from consciousness. His subsequent revisions implicated a second, more extensive category of inchoate forces that either lost or never attained psychic representation and, although motivationally active, were not fixed in meaning, symbolically embodied, attached to associational chains, etc. Following Freud's theory of representation, the author conceptualizes these latter forces as "unrepresented" or "weakly represented" mental states that make a demand upon the mind for work and require transformation into something that is represented in the psyche, if they are to be thought about or used to think with. This paper describes, discusses and presents illustrations of this transformational process (figurability),that moves intersubjectively from unrepresented or weakly represented mental states to represented mental states, from force to meaning, from the inchoate to mental order.     

Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a "tweet" is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., "ant") by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7?days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.     

What does it mean to ‘live’ and ‘die’? A cross‐linguistic analysis of parent–child conversations in English and Indonesian

Previous work on children's intuitive knowledge about the natural world has documented their difficulty in acquiring an overarching concept of biological life that includes plants as well as humans and non‐human animals. It has also suggested that the acquisition of fundamental biological concepts like alive and die may be influenced by the language used to describe them, as evidenced by differences between English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children's performance in tasks involving these concepts. Here, we examine one particularly important source of linguistic information available to children during this acquisition process: everyday conversations with their parents. We take a cross‐linguistic approach in analysing the evidence available to English‐ and Indonesian‐speaking children as they acquire meanings for words corresponding to the concepts alive and die . Our analysis illustrates that young children acquiring English and Indonesian are faced with distinct problems, but that parental input in both languages does little to support the acquisition of broad, inclusive biological concepts.     

A formal ontology of situations

A generalized Wittgensteinian semantics for propositional languages is presented, based on a lattice of elementary situations. Of these, maximal ones are possible worlds, constituting a logical space; minimal ones are logical atoms, partitioned into its dimensions. A verifier of a proposition is an elementary situation such that if real it makes true. The reference (or objective) of a proposition is a situation, which is the set of all its minimal verifiers. (Maximal ones constitute its locus.) Situations are shown to form a Boolean algebra, and the Boolean set algebra of loci is its representation. Wittgenstein's is a special case, admitting binary dimensions only.     

Reading Xunzi through Nāmā: Two Ancient Inquiries into the Nature of Names

This essay is a comparison between two ancient theories of language—the 5th century BCE Indian etymologist Yāska and the 4th century BCE Chinese philosopher Xunzi 荀子. Specifically, it is a reading of the theory of “the rectification of names” in Xunzi through the lens of Yāska. Xunzi is known for his view that humanity’s innate tendencies need to be shaped through education and ritual. Similarly, ancient Indian authors like Yāska understand that a person is created, or made, through the performance of Vedic sacrifice. Both thinkers’ constructivist theories of language and meaning proceed from these ritual assumptions. However, Yāska would query Xunzi’s inherent distrust of multiple meanings of words and their negative effects on a functional state. Guided instead by a theory of the transcendence of Vedic language, Yāska would argue that the more one can proliferate possible meanings the more powerful a word becomes.     

The role of derivational morphology in vocabulary acquisition: get by with a little help from my morpheme friends

This study explores the role of morphology in vocabulary knowledge of 3rd and 6th grade Finnish elementary school children. In a word definition task, children from both grades performed overall better on derived words than on monomorphemic words. However, the results were modified by the factors Frequency and Productivity. Most strikingly, performance on monomorphemic words was disproportionately weaker than on derived words at the low frequency range. At the high-frequency range, derived words with low-productive suffixes yielded poorest performance. We partly make an appeal to the lexical-statistical properties of the Finnish language to explain the interaction of Frequency and Word Structure. At any rate, the results suggest that Finnish elementary school children benefit significantly from utilizing morphology in determining word meanings.     

Horwich on meaning and use

Paul Horwich claims that theories of meaning ought to accommodate the commonsense intuition that meanings play a part in explaining the use of words. Further, he argues that the view that best does so is that according to which the meaning of a word is constituted by a disposition to accept, in some circumstances, sentences in which it features. I argue that if meanings are construed thus, they will in fact fail to explain the use of words. I also argue that if we insist, as Horwich does, on the commonsense assumption that meanings are a species of entity, all versions of the view that meaning is constituted by our dispositions to use words will have to be rejected. I do not, however, claim that such theories ought to be rejected. My point is that they are incompatible with the requirements of commonsense. Further, I suggest that it is premature to impose such requirements on theories of meaning.     

Recognizing cognates and interlingual homographs: Effects of code similarity in language-specific and generalized lexical decision

In four experiments, we investigated how cross-linguistic overlap in semantics, orthography, and phonology affects bilingual word recognition in different variants of the lexical decision task. Dutch-English bilinguals performed a language-specific or a generalized lexical decision task including words that are spelled and/or pronounced the same in English and in Dutch and that matched one-language control words from both languages. In Experiments 1 and 3, "false friends" with different meanings in the two languages (e.g., spot) were presented, whereas in Experiments 2 and 4 cognates with the same meanings across languages (e.g., film) were presented. The language-specific Experiments 1 and 2 replicated and qualified an earlier study (Dijkstra, Grainger, & Van Heuven, 1999). In the generalized Experiment 3, participants reacted equally quickly on Dutch-English homographs and Dutch control words, indicating that their response was based primarily on the fastest available orthographic code (i.e., Dutch). In Experiment 4, cognates were recognized faster than English and Dutch controls, suggesting coactivation of the cognates' semantics. The nonword results indicate that the bilingual rejection procedure can, to some extent, be language specific. All results are discussed within the BIA+ (bilingual interactive activation) model for bilingual word recognition.