Connecting the research fields of lexical ambiguity and figures of speech
Polysemy effects for conventional metaphors and metonyms
The current studies investigated the processing and storage of lexical metaphors and metonyms by combining two existing methodologies from ambiguity research: counting the number of senses (as in e.g., Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002) and determining the relationship between those senses (as in e.g., Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007). We have called these two types of ambiguity ‘numerical polysemy’ and ‘relational polysemy’. Studies employing a lexical decision task (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization task (Experiment 2) compared processing of metaphorical and non-metaphorical words while controlling for number of senses. The effects of relational polysemy were investigated in more detail with a further lexical decision study (Experiment 3). Results showed a metaphor advantage and metonymy disadvantage which conflict with earlier findings of reverse patterns (e.g., Klepousniotou & Baum, 2007). The fact that both conventional lexical metaphors and metonyms can incur either processing advantages or disadvantages strongly suggests they are not inherently stored differently in the mental lexicon.
References (20)
Armstrong, B.C., & Plaut, D.C. (2008). Settling dynamics in distributed networks explain task differences in semantic ambiguity effects: Computational and behavioral investigations. In
Proceedings of the 31st annual conference of the cognitive science society
. Hillsdale, NJ: Cognitive Science Society.
Baayen, R.H. (2008). Analyzing linguistic data: A practical introduction to statistics using R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baayen, R.H., Piepenbrock, R., & Van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX lexical database. [CD-ROM] Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.
Beretta, A., Fiorentino, R., & Poeppel, D. (2005). The effects of homonymy and polysemy on lexical access: An MEG study. Cognitive Brain Research, 241, 57-65.
Bowdle, B.F., & Gentner, D. (2005). The career of metaphor. Psychological Review, 1121, 193–216.
Coltheart, M. (1981). The MRC psycholinguistic database. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 331, 334–338. Retrieved from: [URL].
Gilhooly, K.J., & Logie, R.H. (1980). Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words. Behavior Research Methods and Instrumentation, 121, 395–427.
Glucksberg, S. (2003). The psycholinguistics of metaphor. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 71, 92–96.
Hino, Y., Pexman, P.M., & Lupker, S.J. (2006). Ambiguity and relatedness effects in semantic tasks: Are they due to semantic coding? Journal of Memory and Language, 551, 247–273.
Jager, B., & Cleland, A.A. (in press). Polysemy advantage with abstract but not concrete words. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research.
Kacinik, N.A., & Chiarello, C. (2007). Understanding metaphors: Is the right hemisphere uniquely involved? Brain and language, 1001, 188–207.
Klepousniotou, E. (2002). The processing of lexical ambiguity: Homonymy and polysemy in the mental lexicon. Brain and Language, 811, 205–223.
Klepousniotou, E., & Baum, S.R. (2007). Disambiguating the ambiguity advantage effect in word recognition: An advantage for polysemous but not homonymous words. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 201, 1–24.
Klepousniotou, E., Pike, G.B., Steinhauer, K., & Gracco, V. (2012). Not all ambiguous words are created equal: An EEG investigation of homonymy and polysemy. Brain and language, 1231, 11–21.
Klepousniotou, E., Titone, D., & Romero, C. (2008). Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 341, 1534–1543.
Noble, C.E. (1953). The meaning-familiarity relationship. Psychological Review, 601, 89–98.
Parks, R., Ray, J., & Bland, S. (1998). Wordsmyth English dictionary – Thesaurus. [ONLINE]. Available: [URL], University of Chicago.
Rodd, J.M., Gaskell, M.G., & Marslen-Wilson, W.D. (2002). Making sense of semantic ambiguity: Semantic competition in Lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language, 461, 245–266.
Rodd, J.M., Gaskell, M.G., & Marslen-Wilson, W.D. (2004). Modelling the effects of semantic ambiguity in word recognition. Cognitive Science, 281, 89–104.
Tamminen, J., Cleland, A.A., Quinlan, P.T., & Gaskell, M.G. (2006). Processing semantic ambiguity: Different loci for meanings and senses.
Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society
, 2222-2227. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Apresjan, Valentina, Anastasiya Lopukhina & Maria Zarifyan
2021.
Representation of Different Types of Adjectival Polysemy in the Mental Lexicon.
Frontiers in Psychology 12
Maciejewski, Greg, Jennifer M. Rodd, Mark Mon-Williams & Ekaterini Klepousniotou
2020.
The cost of learning new meanings for familiar words.
Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 35:2
► pp. 188 ff.
Lopukhina, Anastasiya, Anna Laurinavichyute, Konstantin Lopukhin & Olga Dragoy
2018.
The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes.
Frontiers in Psychology 9
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.