Abstract A single encounter with an ambiguous word (e.g. bark, ball) in the context of a less-frequent meaning (e.g. “Sally worried about how crowded the ball would be.”) can shift the later interpretation of the word toward the same subordinate meaning. This lexical-semantic retuning functions to improve future comprehension of ambiguous words. The present paper investigates the relationship between this form of learning and the specific processes that occur during sentence comprehension. One possibility is that lexical-semantic retuning occurs immediately upon hearing the ambiguous word, during initial meaning activation and selection, so priming should be strongest when the disambiguating context is provided before the ambiguous word (prior disambiguation). Alternatively, priming may relate to the degree of reinterpretation needed, which would predict maximal learning when the word is initially misunderstood because the critical context is given after the word (subsequent disambiguation, e.g. “Sally worried that the ball would be too crowded.”). In four experiments, adults listened to prior and subsequent disambiguation sentences, and were later tested on their interpretations of primed and unprimed ambiguous words. The results showed that lexical-semantic retuning can occur for both sentence types. Importantly, however, the emergence of priming for subsequent disambiguation sentences was sensitive to the prime conditions: when the task could potentially be performed without needing to re-analyse the ambiguity, then no significant priming was observed. This is consistent with the ‘good enough’ view of language processing which states that representations can remain as (im)precise as mandated by the situation, and that lexical-semantic retuning operates on the output of good-enough interpretation. More generally, our findings suggest that lexical-semantic retuning is driven by participants’ final interpretation of the word meanings during the prime encounter, regardless of initial meaning activation or misinterpretation.

中文翻译：

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句子理解与词义重调的关系

摘要 在不太常见的意思（例如“莎莉担心球会多拥挤。”）的上下文中遇到一个模棱两可的词（例如树皮，球）可以将后来对该词的解释转向同一个下属意义。这种词汇语义重调的功能是提高未来对歧义词的理解。本文研究了这种学习形式与句子理解过程中发生的具体过程之间的关系。一种可能性是，在初始含义激活和选择期间，在听到歧义词时立即发生词汇-语义重新调整，因此当歧义词在歧义词之前提供时（先消歧义），启动应该最强。或者，启动可能与需要重新解释的程度有关，当这个词最初被误解时，它可以预测最大学习，因为在这个词之后给出了关键上下文（随后的消歧，例如“Sally 担心球会太拥挤。”）。在四个实验中，成年人听了之前和之后的消歧句，然后测试了他们对引语和非引语歧义词的解释。结果表明，两种句子类型都可以发生词汇语义重调。然而，重要的是，随后消歧句的启动对初始条件很敏感：当任务可以潜在地执行而无需重新分析歧义时，则没有观察到显着的启动。这与语言处理的“足够好”观点一致，该观点指出表示可以保持（不）精确，如情况所要求的那样，并且词汇语义重新调整对足够好解释的输出进行操作。更一般地说，我们的研究结果表明，词汇语义重新调整是由参与者在初次相遇期间对单词含义的最终解释所驱动的，而不管最初的含义激活或误解如何。