Why Are There So Many Meanings? Ambiguity

Why do so many words and sentences have multiple meanings? How do we deal with all of the overlaps? In this week's episode, we talk about ambiguity: where it comes from, how we deal with processing it, and how children pick meanings from the menu of semantic possibilities they're presented with.

This is Topic #73!

This week's tag language: Tongan!

Related episodes:
Scoping Out the Truth: Scope Ambiguity -
Walking the Garden Path: How We Parse Sentences -
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology -

Last episode:
Some Assembly Required: Derivational and Inflectional Morphology -

Other of our psycholinguistics videos:
Finding Sense in Sounds: The Arbitrariness of the Sign -
Follow My Eyes: Eye Tracking -
Prime Time: Priming Experiments -

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For a discussion of kids and semantic scope ambiguity, check out the extra materials from Episode 8:

Sources:
The basis for much of this episode are various discussions of ambiguity in Eva Fernández and Helen Smith Cairns's book, Fundamentals of Psycholinguistics.

The linked meanings vs. different meanings lexical ambiguity study:
Rodd, J., G. Gaskell, and W. Marslen-Wilson. (2002). Making sense of semantic ambiguity: Semantic competition in lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language 46: 245-66.

On kids' difficulties in recovering from erroneous or weird interpretations:
Trueswell, J.C. (2008). Using eye movements as a developmental measure within psycholinguistics. In Sekerina, Fernandez, and Clahsen (eds), Developmental Psycholinguistics: On-line Methods in Children's Language Processing, 73-96.
Kidd, E., A. Stewart, & L. Serratrice (2011). Children do not overcome lexical biases where adults do: The role of the referential scene in garden path recovery. Journal of Child Language, 38, 222 - 234.

Kids and ambiguity detection:
Hirsh-Pasek, K., L.R. Gleitman, & H. Gleitman. (1978). What did the brain say to the mind? A study of the detection and report of ambiguity by young children. In Sinclair, Jervella, and Levelt (eds), The Child's Conception of Language, 97-132.
Peters, A.M. & E. Zaidel. (1980). The acquisition of homonymy. Cognition 8, 187-207. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(80)90012-8

It's worth noting that kids' ability to learn and recognize homonyms is still a matter of ongoing research, although there does seem to be something there. For more discussion, see:
Backscheider, A.G. & Susan A. Gelman. (1995). Children's understanding of homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 22, 107-127. doi:10.1017/S030500090000965X.
Doherty, M.J. (2004). Children's difficulty in learning homonyms. Journal of Child Language, 31, 203-214. doi:10.1017/S030500090300583X.

Kids' reading skills and ambiguity detection:
Wankoff, L. & H. Cairns. (2009). Why ambiguity detection is a predictor of reading skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly 30 (3), 183-92.
Cairns, H.S., D. Waltzman, & G. Schlisselberg. (2004). Detecting the ambiguity of sentences: Relationship to early reading skill. Communication Disorders Quarterly 27 (4), 213-20.

Relative clause processing:
Jun, S.-A. (2003). Prosodic phrasing and attachment preferences. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 32: 219-249.
Fernández, E. (2002). Bilingual sentence processing: relative clause attachment in English and Spanish.

See you all in two weeks!

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