The most frequently used words in English are highly ambiguous; for example, Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary lists 94 meanings for the word "run" as a verb alone. Yet people rarely notice this ambiguity. Solving this puzzle has commanded the efforts of cognitive scientists for many years. The solution most often identified is "context": we use the context of utterance to determine the proper meanings of words and sentences. The problem then becomes specifying the nature of context and how it interacts with the rest of an understanding system. The difficulty becomes especially apparent in the attempt to write a computer program to understand natural language. Lexical ambiguity resolution (LAR), then, is one of the central problems in natural language and computational semantics research. A collection of the best research on LAR available, this volume offers eighteen original papers by leading scientists. Part I, Computer Models, describes nine attempts to discover the processes necessary for disambiguation by implementing programs to do the job. Part II, Empirical Studies, goes into the laboratory setting to examine the nature of the human disambiguation mechanism and the structure of ambiguity itself. A primary goal of this volume is to propose a cognitive science perspective arising out of the conjunction of work and approaches from neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and artificial intelligence--thereby encouraging a closer cooperation and collaboration among these fields. Lexical Ambiguity Resolution is a valuable and accessible source book for students and cognitive scientists in AI, psycholinguistics, neuropsychology, or theoretical linguistics.

Explains how preschoolers learn and offers parents of preschoolers advice on how they can improve their child's learning skills and become effective teachers.

The ability to communicate through spoken and written language is one of the defining characteristics of the human race, yet it remains a deeply mysterious process. The young science of psycholinguistics attempts to uncover the mechanisms and representations underlying human language. This interdisciplinary field has seen massive developments over the past decade, with a broad expansion of the research base, and the incorporation of new experimental techniques such as brain imaging and computational modelling. The result is that real progress is being made in the understanding of the key components of language in the mind. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics brings together the views of 75 leading researchers in psycholinguistics to provide a comprehensive and authoritative review of the current state of the art in psycholinguistics. With almost 50 chapters written by experts in the field, the range and depth of coverage is unequalled. The contributors are eminent in a wide range of fields, including psychology, linguistics, human memory, cognitive neuroscience, bilingualism, genetics, development and neuropsychology. Their contributions are organised into six themed sections, covering word recognition, the mental lexicon, comprehension and discourse, language production, language development, and perspectives on psycholinguistics. The breadth of coverage, coupled with the accessibility of the short chapter format should make the handbook essential reading for both students and researchers in the fields of psychology, linguistics and neuroscience.

Abstract: The use of two relevant sources of information--frequency and contextual plausibility--during on-line lexical and syntactic ambiguity resolution was examined as a function of verbal working memory capacity in four self-paced reading experiments. Experiment 1 demonstrated that lexical ambiguity resolution was more difficult when disambiguating sentences toward the less frequent homograph meaning. Experiment 2 showed that lexical ambiguity resolution was facilitated when homographs were preceded by strong contextual plausibility information. Experiment 3 found that syntactic ambiguity resolution was facilitated when verb bias information supported the syntactic parse, and experiment 4 demonstrated that contextual plausibility cues which disfavored the incorrect syntactic parse eased sentence comprehension. These results replicated previous research. Additionally, verbal working memory capacity did not mediate ambiguity effects in any of the four experiments. These data best support the working memory theory proposed by Caplan and Waters (1999), who hypothesize that on-line sentence comprehension is not mediated by verbal working memory resources, and these data provide evidence against other working memory theories that have been proposed by Just and Carpenter (1992) and Pearlmutter and MacDonald (1995). Ambiguity effects from each experiment were correlated with the other experiments. An individual's ability to use frequency information correlated with the ability to use contextual plausibility information within lexical ambiguities and within syntactic ambiguities. These results support a model of language in which frequency and contextual plausibility cues interact within each linguistic domain. An individual's ability to use homograph bias was not correlated with the ability to use verb bias, and an individual's ability to use contextual plausibility information was not correlated across lexical and syntactic ambiguities. These results support the autonomy theory, which posits that lexical and syntactic ambiguities are processed independently. These results are also discussed with respect to implications for the lexically-based constraint satisfaction theory, which hypothesizes that lexical and syntactic ambiguities are processed through a single mechanism by the same resources.