Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 4. PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTS 136
workers protected the plant, The football player fumbled the ball). Their results generally
lend support to the idea of a more or less autonomous lexical access process, followed by a
rapid process of selection of the appropriate meanings on the basis of context.
Williams's (1992) experiments also have important implications for those described
here. Williams notes the work of Swinney 1979, Seidenberg et al. 1982, and others on
homonyms, and points out that polysemous words raise somewhat di erent questions. Since
the various senses of a polysemous word are, by de nition, more closely related than the
senses of homonymous words, it is not clear whether or not the model based on homonyms,
i.e. rapid simultaneous activation of all the senses followed by rapid selection of a contex-
tually appropriate sense, will work. Williams also cites the work of Durkin & Manning
(1989) measuring the relatedness of the senses of polysemous words using a questionnaire
technique and notes that the authors are correct in saying that the results of such survey
techniques cannot be assumed to apply to the moment tomoment processing of language.
Williams' experiments sought tocombine information about the relative importance and
degree of relatedness of the senses of polysemous words (such as that found in Durkin and
Manning's work) with priming experiments like those of Seidenberg et al. (1982).
Williams' rst experiment was based on eight polysemous adjectives. For each
of them, a more central sense and a less central sense were determined, based on the
entries in the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary, inwhich more frequent and/or
more concrete senses are listed rst; a one-word synonym was found for each reading, e.g.,
awkward (clumsy (central) or embarrassing (non-central)), strong (mighty or intense).
All of Williams' stimuli were presented visually, with the prime disappearing and being
replaced (either immediately or after an interval) by the probe; timing of stimulus onset
asynchronies (SOAs) is from the onset of the display of the last part of the prime to the
onset of the probe. The task was a lexical decision task.
First, a group of subjects were shown just single words as primes followed by the
probes at an SOA of 250 ms. There was signi cant priming of the probes when the prime
was related to the probe, and this priming e ect was approximately equal, whether the
sense of the probe was central or non-central, e.g. a prime of the ambiguous word rm
facilitates a probe of either solid or strict about equally.
Next, as in other experiments, sentences were constructed as primes, with the word
of interest as the last word in each sentence: