Cognition, Behavior, and Memory
Author: Julieta Laurino | email: julilaurino@gmail.com
Julieta Laurino 1°, Laura Kaczer 1°
1° Instituto de Fisiología, Biología Molecular y Neurociencias (IFIByNE – UBA – CONICET)
Many of the words we use have more than one meaning, which is known as semantic ambiguity. But how do we decide which meaning is appropriate each time we encounter an ambiguous word? In this study, we assessed the role of context in the evocation of meaning in ambiguous words. First, we evaluated whether it is possible to bias the interpretation of an ambiguous word by previously presenting a context related to one of its meanings. Furthermore, we explored the extent to which short-term memory contributes to this process by evaluating word meaning access at a longer interval. Results showed that recent context influences preference for an ambiguous word meaning, and that this effect decays over time. However, the question remains whether it is the time interval itself or the presence of unrelated contexts that promotes the decay in the interpretation bias. Ongoing experiments explore this question by including a semantically unrelated task (math task) during the interval. Future work will evaluate if a physiological correlate of ambiguity and context effects can be observed in pupil dilation as a result of a higher attentional demand. We expect ambiguous words to present greater pupil dilation, and even greater if the ambiguous word is preceded by a context related to its less common meaning. Taken together, these results suggest that adults lexical-semantic representations are highly malleable, being able to update to their most recent experience.