SEMANTIC AMBIGUITY EFFECTS IN WORD IDENTIFICATION

The influence of semantic ambiguity on word identification processes w as explored in a series of word naming and lexical-decision experiment s. There was no reliable ambiguity effect in 2 naming experiments, alt hough an ambiguity advantage in lexical decision was obtained when ort hographically legal nonwords were used. No ambiguity effect was found in lexical decision when orthographically illegal nonwords were used, implying a semantic locus for the ambiguity advantage. These results w ere simulated by using a distributed memory model that also produces t he ambiguity disadvantage in gaze duration that has been obtained with a reading comprehension task. Ambiguity effects in the model arise fr om the model's attempt to activate multiple meanings of an ambiguous w ord in response to presentation of that word's orthographic pattern. R easons for discrepancies in empirical results and implications for dis tributed memory models are considered.