Hogaboam and Perfetti: "Lexical Ambiguity and Sentence Comprehension" (1975)

Along with the 1979 paper by David Swinney, this paper by Thomas Hogaboam and Charles Perfetti seems to be one of the most cited early papers on the psychology of ambiguity resolution. It is notable for pointing out the prominent function of word sense frequency.

The Language Machine

In a distinctly 1950s cognitive psychology style, the paper contrasts a number of hypotheses about ambiguity resolution, each formulated as a little block of virtual computer code:

[According to the prior decision model] the processes that provide access to lexical items may operate in such a way as to provide access only to the contextually correct meaning. (p. 265)

In [the exhaustive computation model] both meanings of an ambiguous word are accessed and further processed to determine which meaning is appropriate to the context. (p. 265)

[The one meaning hypothesis] holds that one meaning is accessed and checked against the context. If a match occurs the other meanings are not accessed, but if a match does not occur the process is repeated until a match is found. (p. 265)

When the "one meaning hypothesis" makes the additional assumption that the meanings are looked up in decreasing order of frequency (rather than randomly), it is called the "ordered search hypothesis":

In the ordered search model when an ambiguous word occurs in a sentence, an ordered lexical search takes place. The order of the search is determined by frequency of usage of the lexical entries, the most frequent being first. The search is self-terminating, so that as soon as an acceptable match occurs, no other lower entries will be checked, and all higher entries will have already been checked. (p. 266)

Since the prior decision model and the random-search version of the one meaning hypothesis are quickly dispatched, this leaves only the exhaustive computation hypothesis and the ordered search hypothesis in the field.

The Reduced Field

Hogaboam and Perfetti do, however, consider the option that exhaustive computation may occur differentiated in time. This leads in practice to the following set of competing hypotheses (p. 272):

The two leftmost drawings represent an exhaustive and an ordered search, respectively. The rightmost panel represents a modified version of the exhaustive search:

According to this model a search initiated at a token node activates both senses, but the primary sense becomes activated prior to the secondary sense. […] That is, both senses could be processed in parallel, but the primary sense may take less to to process and would thus be available for other processes sooner than the secondary sense. (p. 272)

So while parallel processing and time differences are in principle conceivable in the algorithmic world of Hogaboam and Perfetti, differences in activation are not: You either move stuff from the disk drive to the working memory, or you don't.

Serial or Skewed Parallel?

Interestingly, they do raise the concern that all of this speculation about mental algorithms may multiply entities beyond necessity. Specifically, there is a risk that the models only differ as to whether they hypothesize a computation in the working memory or in the long-term storage:

That is, under the conceptualization represented by the panel on the right, an ordering effect would be expected at a working memory level. This possibility indicates that contrasting the various models of the disambiguation process in effect may be setting up straw men. (p. 272)

However, their experiment (discussed below) does show observable differences between words, and these have to be ascribed some cause or other. From the perspective of 1975 cognitive science, the safest best seems to be word senses queuing up for serial processing:

For the present it is most parsimonious to propose, as a hypothesis, that the effect is a true order-of-processing effect and not an artifact of parallel processing. (p. 272)

So while they do briefly flirt with the idea of differentiated activation in a parallel network, they quickly return home to the comfortable world of Turing machines plodding from discrete state to discrete state.

The Big Deal

The experiment itself is set up as follows: A tape recording of a sentence is played to you, and you then have to decide whether its last word is ambiguous or not. If it is ambiguous, you must come up with an example of a different sense the word can be used in.

Here are some example sentences that can illustrate the task:

1. The antique typewriter was missing a letter.
2. The anti-pollution campaign created interest.
3. The gun collector displayed the arms.
4. The tired hiker rested his feet.

If you're like the average test subject, you should find this task more difficult for sentences 2 and 4, but easier for sentences 1 and 3.

This is because the words in the difficult sentences are used in their dominant meaning; you thus have to retrieve a relatively rare word sense in order to come up with a response. For the easy sentences, however, the word is used in a less frequent sense, and you can cite the frequent and readily available word sense as a response.

As indicated above, there is a number of ways that one can interpret this result. However, it should be clear that at the very least, it demonstrates that frequency plays a key role in word comprehension.

Hart and Perfetti: "Learning Words in Zekkish" (2008)

Because of the interesting quotes and references from Gerard Steen, I decided to take a look at some of the papers at Charles Perfetti's homepage. He has generously put many of them online and even scanned some book chapters.

Perfetti is mainly a scholar of the cognitive and developmental psychology of reading, so not everything he writes can be directly translated into the debates about semantics that I'm interested in. However, this book chapter, written with Lesley Hart, discusses disambiguation along with resolution of other input ambiguities (including the resolution of phonetically ambiguous words like content).

The upshot of the discussion is that disambiguation is a horse race process: When a phonologically unambiguous but semantically ambiguous word is read, a number of candidate meanings are activated, and a winner is then found by mutual inhibition:

With ambiguous words there is no phonological competition; however, the context and the extent of bias in the context in which the word appears (Vu, Kellas, Petersen & Metcalf, 2003), word-specific qualities such as word structure (Almeida & Libben, 2005), and the relative frequency of use of each of the meanings (Collins, 2002) remains necessary for choosing among multiple activated lexical entries. (p. 112)

They also briefly mention the surprisingly heated debate around the question of when in the process contextually irrelevant meanings are killed off:

There is some debate as to the power of biasing contexts to speed the response time for subordinate meanings. For example, can reading "bank" in a sentence like "There were crocodiles sunning themselves on the bank" improve response time times to the river meaning of bank more than sentences like "We took a picture of the bank," for which either meaning of "bank" can be appropriate? Martin, Vu, Kellas, and Metcalf (1999) claim that strongly biasing context can override word meaning biases from frequency, whereas weakly biasing context cannot. Binder & Rayner disagree with the power of strongly biasing context; they find that strongly biasing context does not have enough strength to incase the activation rate of lower frequency word meanings. (p. 113)

As a side note, I'm not sure the first reference here is to the right paper: George Kellas and Hoang Vu wrote a similarly-titled paper which was a direct response to Katherine S. Binder and Keith Rayner's paper, so maybe that's what Hart and Perfetti in fact wanted to cite.

Steen: Finding Metaphor in Grammar and Usage (2007)

Gerard Steen's 2007 book on metaphor is very long, and it contains both chapters that are interesting for me and chapter that aren't. Steen has chosen to read the chapters so as to cover all the possible combinations of the following pairs of dichotomies (cf. ch. 1.4):

• grammar — usage
• language — thought
• symbols — behavior

So that's eight topics. Not surprisingly, this structuring a book this way produces a fair bit of repetition, but it also makes it easy to skip things that are less important to you.

From my perspective, the two important chapters the ones that touch on psycholinguistic aspects of the theory. That's chapters 9 and 12.

Curriculum

There's a list of books and papers that seem to have been more informative of Steen's position than others. I would say his core reading list consists of the following:

• Rachel Giora: On Our Mind (2003)
• Ray Gibbs: Embodiment and Cognitive Science (2005)
• Ellen Winner: The Point of Words (1988)
• Charles A. Perfetti: "Comprehending Written Language," in The Neurocognition of Language (1999)

He also refers a number of times to Lynne Cameron's Metaphor in Educational Discourse (2003), although that seems to be less central to his argument.

With respect to the debates about the psychological reality of conceptual mappings, he cites the following works in particular a lot:

• Lera Borodistsky: "Metaphoric Structuring" (2000)
• The debate in Cognition between Gregory L. Murphy (1996, 1997), and Ray Gibbs (1996)
• The debate in Cognitive Linguistics between William Croft (1998), Dominiek Sandra (1998), David Tuggy (1999)

There are other references as well, but these are the ones that receive the most attention.

Conclusions

Much of the point of Steen extensive methodological discussion is to weed out some of the more crazy claims made by cognitive metaphor theorists. In the process of doing so, he occasionally his own opinions on these matters.

Somewhat surprisingly, he is quite pessimistic about the cognitive validity of cognitive metaphor theory. In his discussion of Perfetti and Giora, he poses the following three questions (pp. 351–52):

1. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve the activation of both the basic nonmetaphorical sense as well as the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of linguistic form)?
2. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always involve such a degree of activation of the basic nonmetaphorical sense that it is sufficiently rich to function as a conceptual source domain for mapping the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure domains)?
3. Does the activation of polysemous words with metaphorical senses, in comprehension contexts requiring the metaphorical sense, always display some manifestation of an obligatory mapping from the basic nonmetaphorical sense to the indirect metaphorical sense (processing of conceptual structure of mapping)?

(Incidentally, this quote also illustrates Steen's almost meditatively repetitive style.) Anyway, his own answer to these questions is negative:

Salient word meanings [in the sense of Giora] are word meaning that are frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, and it is these senses which are quickest to retrieve. Since metaphorical word senses may also be highly frequent, familiar, conventional, and prototypical, they may also be activated faster than their nonmetaphorical counterparts. It follows that questions 3, 2 and even 1 have to receive negative answers, as may be inferred from Giora's detailed review of her own and other researcher's work. (p. 352)

It follows that the symbolic analyses we know from cognitive metaphor theory don't really have much cognitive validity:

The fact that symbolic synchronic or historical analysis may helpfully privilege a particular class of senses as direct or nonmetaphorical does not directly map onto individuals' cognitive representation of such senses as prior or even necessary in the online comprehension of linguistic forms when these are to be processed in the metaphorical ways. (p. 352)

That's pretty radical, but it's perhaps less surprising if we see Steen as the strict methodology policeman of cognitive metaphor theory — in that case, we would expect him to have the most cautious conclusions in the field.