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

CHAPTER 4. PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTS 139
own spontaneous categories), etc. There is no reason to suppose that all speakers
have exactly the same set of senses, but it is likely that there will be a great deal of
overlap, which is essential to communication in general.
Since see is a highly polysemous, high-frequency word, we expect that our subjects
will produce more senses than Jorgensen's subjects, on average.
Since the senses appear to have a complex structure, some senses being more cen-
tral than others, we would expect to nd broad, although not necessarily perfect,
agreement among speakers as to which are the central senses.
In a cross-modal priming experiment using a lexical decision task, in accord with
Williams's (1992) ndings, we would predict that sentences which provide a context
for one sense of see would facilitate (prime) responses to a probe consisting of the
keyword for that sense of see, compared to a non-word probes; e.g., after the sentence
Maria saw the cat on the couch, wewould expect subjects to respond to the keyword
eye more quickly than to a non-word.
Likewise, on cross-modal priming using a categorial judgement task, we would predict
that sentences which provide a context for one sense of see would facilitate responses
to a probe consisting of the keyword for that sense of see, relative to probes consisting
of keywords for other senses.
Also on the basis of Williams (1992), we would predict di erential cross-sense priming
e ects, so that sentences biased toward non-central senses of see would facilitate
probes for central senses more than conversely.
4.2 Experiment 1
As a rst step toward testing these hypotheses, we conducted an experiment to
answer the following questions:
If non-linguist native speakers of English are given a set of sentences containing see
randomly selected from a corpus, and asked to sort them into their own categories,
to what degree will their categorizations be similar to each other? Will there be
\lumpers" and \splitters", that is, some subjects who tend to make few distinctions
and other subjects who tend to make many ne distinctions?