Chinese characters hold great potential to help inform and enrich psycholinguistic research on lexical ambiguity as a large portion of them are ambiguous in nature with meaning varying from context to context. This report presents a psycholinguistic database that contains over 2000 characters with normative measures for meaning dominance and meaning balance, that is, the relative frequency of each meaning associated with a target character and the degree of balance across the meanings of the character. The measurement process takes advantage of the fact that, in Chinese, generating words containing a target character is the most convenient way to specify and disambiguate character meanings. Character meanings stored in ordinary people’s mental lexicon are identified based on the words, along with a small portion of meaning descriptions, listed by over 900 native speakers. The measures of meaning dominance and meaning balance for the characters are derived from computing the relative frequencies of the meanings. Potential research and practical applications of the database, as a valuable tool, to enhance our understanding of the acquisition, representation, and processing of ambiguous lexical items are discussed.

Words with complex semantic types such as book are characterised by a multiplicity of interpretations that are not mutually exclusive (e.g., as a physical object and/or informational content). Their status with respect to lexical ambiguity is notoriously unclear, and it is debatable whether complex types are a particular form of polysemy (closely related to metonymy) or whether they belong to monosemy. In this study, we investigate the nature of complex types by conducting two experiments on ambiguous nouns in French. The first experiment collects speakers’ judgements about the sameness of meaning between different uses of complex-type, metonymic and monosemous words. The second experiment uses a priming paradigm and a sensicality task to investigate the online processing of complex-type words, as opposed to metonymic and monosemous words. Overall results indicate that, on a continuum of lexical ambiguity, complex types are closer to monosemy than to metonymy. The different interpretations of complex-type words are highly connected and fall under the same meaning, arguably in relation to a unique reference. These results suggest that complex types are associated with single underspecified entries in the mental lexicon. Moreover, they highlight the need for a model of lexical representations of ambiguous words that can account for the difference between complex types and metonymy.

This study investigated the role of verbal working memory on bilingual lexical disambiguation. Spanish–English bilinguals read sentences that ended in either a cognate or noncognate homonym or a control word. Participants decided whether follow-up target words were related in meaning to the sentences. On critical trials, sentences biased the subordinate meaning of a homonym and were followed by targets related to the dominant meaning. Bilinguals with high span were faster at rejecting unrelated targets when the sentences ended in a homonym, whereas bilinguals with low span were slower. Furthermore, error rates for bilinguals with low span showed cognate inhibition, while bilinguals with high span showed no effects of cross-language activation. Results demonstrated that bilinguals with high span benefit from shared lexical codes whether these converge on to a single semantic representation (cognates) or not (homonyms). Conversely, bilinguals with low span showed inhibition from the competing lexical codes, even when they converge onto a single semantic representation.

The impact of basal ganglia dysfunction on semantic processing was investigated by comparing the performance of individuals with nonthalamic subcortical (NS) vascular lesions, Parkinson's disease (PD), cortical lesions, and matched controls on a semantic priming task. Unequibiased lexical ambiguity primes were used in auditory prime-target pairs comprising 4 critical conditions; dominant related (e.g., bank–money), subordinate related (e.g., bank–river), dominant unrelated (e.g., foot–money) and subordinate unrelated (e.g., bat–river). Participants made speeded lexical decisions (word/nonword) on targets using a go–no-go response. When a short prime–target interstimulus interval (ISI) of 200 ms was employed, all groups demonstrated priming for dominant and subordinate conditions, indicating nonselective meaning facilitation and intact automatic lexical processing. Differences emerged at the long ISI (1250 ms), where control and cortical lesion participants evidenced selective facilitation of the dominant meaning, whereas NS and PD groups demonstrated a protracted period of nonselective meaning facilitation. This finding suggests a circumscribed deficit in the selective attentional engagement of the semantic network on the basis of meaning frequency, possibly implicating a disturbance of frontal–subcortical systems influencing inhibitory semantic mechanisms. (JINS, 2003, 9, 1041–1052.)