Processing Ambiguous Verbs: Evidence from Eye Movements

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition

Volumn 27, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 556-573

  Pickering, Martin J ^a,c   Frisson, Steven ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ANTWERP   (Belgium)

^c UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ARTICLE; ATTENTION; EYE MOVEMENT; FEMALE; HUMAN; LEARNING; LINGUISTICS; MALE; READING; SEMANTICS;

ADULT; ATTENTION; EYE MOVEMENTS; FEMALE; HUMANS; MALE; PSYCHOLINGUISTICS; READING; SEMANTICS; VERBAL LEARNING;

EID: 0035293130     PISSN: 02787393     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1037/0278-7393.27.2.556     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. Baayen, R. H., Piepenbrock, R., & van Rijn, H. (1993). The CELEX lexical database [CD-ROM]. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania.
2. Bastiaanse, R., & Jonkers, R. (1998). Verb retrieval in action naming and spontaneous speech in agrammatic and anomic aphasia. Aphasiology, 12, 951-969.
3. Binder, K. S., & Morris, R. K. (1995). Eye movements and lexical ambiguity resolution: Effects of prior encounter and discourse topic. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 1186-1196.
4. Binder, K. S., & Rayner, K. (1998). Contextual strength does not modulate the subordinate bias effect: Evidence from eye fixations and self-paced reading. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5, 271-276.
5. Bloom, P. A., & Fischler, I. (1980). Completion norms for 329 sentence contexts. Memory & Cognition, 8, 631-642.
6. Breedin, S. D., Saffran, E. M., & Schwartz, M. F. (1998). Semantic factors in verb retrieval: An effect of complexity. Brain and Language, 63, 1-31.
7. Choi, S., & Gopnik, A. (1995). Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: A cross-linguistic study. Journal of Child Language, 22, 497-529.
8. Clark, E. V. (1993). The lexicon in acquisition. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
9. Clark, H. H. (1983). Making sense of nonce sense. In G. B. Flores d'Arcais & R. Jarvella (Eds.), The process of understanding language (pp. 297-331). New York: Wiley.
10. Clark, H. H., & Gerrig, R. J. (1983). Understanding old words with new meanings. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 22, 591-608.
11. Collins Cobuild English language dictionary. (1987). London: Harper Collins.
12. Duffy, S. A., Morris, R. K., & Rayner, K. (1988). Lexical ambiguity and fixation times in reading. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 429-446.
13. Engelkamp, J. (1989). Memory for performed and imaged noun pairs and verb pairs: A comment on Tore Helstrup. Psychological Research, 50, 241-242.
14. Engelkamp, J., Zimmer, H. D., & Mohr, G. (1990). Differential memory effects of concrete nouns and action verbs. Zeitschrift für Psychologie, 198, 189-216.
15. Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: Eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178-210.
16. Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1987). Resolution of syntactic category ambiguities: Eye movements in parsing lexically ambiguous sentences. Journal of Memory and Language, 26, 505-526.
17. Frazier, L., & Rayner, K. (1990). Taking on semantic commitments: Processing multiple meanings vs. multiple senses. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 181-200.
18. Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (1999). The processing of metonymy: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1347-1365.
19. Frisson, S., & Pickering, M. J. (in press). Obtaining a figurative interpretation for a word: Support for underspecification. Metaphor and Symbol.
20. Geeraerts, D. (1993). Vagueness's puzzles, polysemy's vagaries. Cognitive Linguistics, 4, 223-272.
21. Gentner, D. (1981). Some interesting differences between nouns and verbs. Cognition and Brain Theory, 4, 161-178.
22. Gentner, D. (1982). Why nouns are learned before verbs: Linguistic relativity versus natural partitioning. In S. Kuczaj (Ed.), Language development: Vol. 2. Language, thought, and culture (pp. 301-334). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
23. Gentner, D., & France, I. M. (1988). The verb mutability effect: Studies of the combinatorial semantics of nouns and verbs. In S. L. Small, G. W. Cottrell, & M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Lexical ambiguity resolution: Perspectives from psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, and artificial intelligence (pp. 343-382). San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufman.
24. Gerrig, R. J. (1989). The time course of sense creation. Memory & Cognition, 17, 194-207.
25. Gibbs, R. W. (1990). Comprehending figurative referential descriptions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16, 56-66.
26. Gibbs, R. W. (1994). Figurative thought and figurative language. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), Handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 411-446). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.
27. Helstrup, T. (1989). Memory for performed and imaged noun pairs and verb pairs. Psychological Research, 50, 237-240.
28. Inhoff, A. W., Lima, S. D., & Carroll, P. J. (1984). Contextual effects on metaphor comprehension in reading. Memory & Cognition, 12, 558-567.
29. Kellas, G., & Vu, H. (1999). Strength of context does modulate the subordinate bias effect: A reply to Binder and Rayner. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6, 511-517.
30. Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. (1985). Language and experience: Evidence from the blind child. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
31. MacDonald, M. C. (1993). The interaction of lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 692-715.
32. MacDonald, M. C., Pearlmutter, N. J., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703.
33. Maratsos, M. (1991). How the acquisition of nouns may be different from that of verbs. In N. A. Krasgenor, D. M. Rumbaugh, R. L. Schiefelbusch, & M. Studdert-Kennedy (Eds.), Biological and behavioral determinants of language development (pp. 67-88). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
34. Martin, C., Vu, H., Kellas, G., & Metcalf, K. (1999). Strength of discourse context as a determinant of the subordinate bias effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 52, 813-839.
35. McClelland, J. L., St. John, M., & Taraban, R. (1989). Sentence comprehension: A parallel distributed processing approach. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, 287-335.
36. McElree, B., & Nordlie, J. (1999). Literal and figurative interpretations are computed in equal time. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6, 486-494.
37. Miceli, G., Silveri, M. C., Villa, G., & Caramazza, A. (1984). On the basis for the agrammatic's difficulty in producing main verbs. Cortex, 20, 207-220.
38. Moss, H., & Older, L. (1996). Birkbeck word association norms. Hove, England: Psychology Press.
39. Onishi, K. H., & Murphy, G. L. (1993). Metaphoric reference: When metaphors are not understood as easily as literal expressions. Memory & Cognition, 21, 763-772.
40. Pacht, J. M., & Rayner, K. (1993). The processing of homophonic homographs during reading: Evidence from eye movement studies. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 22, 252-271.
41. Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
42. Rayner, K. (1977). Visual attention in reading: Eye movements reflect cognitive processes. Memory & Cognition, 5, 443-448.
43. Rayner, K., Binder, K. S., & Duffy, S. A. (1999). Contextual strength and the subordinate bias effect. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology A, 52, 841-852.
44. Rayner, K., & Duffy, S. A. (1986). Lexical complexity and fixation times in reading: Effects of word frequency, verb complexity, and lexical ambiguity. Memory & Cognition, 14, 191-201.
45. Rayner, K., Pacht, J. M., & Duffy, S. A. (1994). Effects of prior encounter and discourse bias on the processing of lexically ambiguous words. Journal of Memory and Language, 33, 527-544.
46. Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1987). Eye movements in reading: A tutorial overview. In M. Coltheart (Ed.), Attention and performance XII (pp. 327-362). London: Erlbaum.
47. Rayner, K., & Pollatsek, A. (1989). The psychology of reading. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
48. Rayner, K., Sereno, S., Morris, R., Schmauder, R., & Clifton, C., Jr. (1989). Eye movements and on-line language comprehension processes. Language and Cognitive Processes, 4, 21-50.
49. Reynolds, A. G., & Flagg, P. W. (1976). Recognition memory for elements of sentences. Memory & Cognition, 4, 422-432.
50. Seidenberg, M. S., Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J. M., & Bienkowski, M. (1982). Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 489-537.
51. Semenza, C., Luzzatti, C., & Carabelli, S. (1997). Morphological representation of compound nouns: A study on Italian aphasic patients. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 10, 33-43.
52. Sereno, S. C., Pacht, J. M., & Rayner, K. (1992). The effect of meaning frequency on processing lexically ambiguous words: Evidence from eye fixations. Psychological Science, 3, 296-300.
53. Shelton, J. R., & Caramazza, A. (1999). Deficits in lexical and semantic processing: Implications for models of normal language. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 6, 5-27.
54. Simpson, G., & Burgess, C. (1988). Implications of lexical ambiguity resolution for word recognition and comprehension. In S. Small, G. Cottrell, & M. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Lexical ambiguity resolution (pp. 271-288). New York: Morgan Kaufman.
55. Simpson, G., & Krueger, M. (1991). Selective access of homograph meanings in sentence context. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 627-643.
56. Swinney, D. A. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 645-659.
57. Tabossi, P. (1988). Accessing lexical ambiguity in different types of sentential contexts. Journal of Memory and Language, 27, 324-340.
58. Tabossi, P., Colombo, L., & Job, R. (1987). Accessing lexical ambiguity: Effects of context and dominance. Psychological Research, 49, 161-167.
59. Tabossi, P., & Zardon, F. (1993). Processing ambiguous words in context. Journal of Memory and Language, 32, 359-372.
60. Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J. M., & Seidenberg, M. S. (1979). Evidence for multiple stages in the processing of ambiguous words in syntactic contexts. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 18, 427-440.
61. Tardiff, T. (1996). Nouns are not always learned before verbs: Evidence from Mandarin speakers' early vocabularies. Developmental Psychology, 32, 492-504.
62. Tomasello, M., Akhtar, N., Dodson, K., & Rekau, L. (1997). Differential productivity in young children's use of nouns and verbs. Journal of Child Language, 24, 373-387.
63. Trueswell, J. C., Tanenhaus, M. K., & Kello, C. (1993). Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: Separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 19, 528-553.
64. Zingeser, L. B., & Berndt, R. S. (1990). Retrieval of nouns and verbs in agrammatism and anomia. Brain and Language, 39, 14-32.