When this chef says pot: The importance of the speaker's identity in understanding ambiguous words

Marina Ortega (University of the Basque Country)

Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR (https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to a talk by Marina Ortega-Andrés (University of the Basque Country) entitled "When this chef says pot: The importance of the speaker's identity in understanding ambiguous words" (see the abstract below). The event takes place online on Friday, NOVEMBER 21, 11.00-12.30 Western European Time (WET). Please write to [email protected] for the Zoom link.

All welcome!

ASBTRACT:

In this talk I will explore how listeners interpret ambiguous words based on their previous experience with specific speakers. A widely accepted assumption in psychology and linguistics is that, over the course of life, speakers accumulate vast statistical information about language use—including not only the contexts in which certain words are typically used but also the relative frequency of their meanings. This information should guide (alongside other factors) our interpretations: in absence of more contextual information, we tend to assign words their most frequent or dominant meaning. However, recent studies have shown that these preferences are not fixed. A single exposure to a word in a disambiguated context can alter its later interpretation, at least temporarily. For example, after hearing bark referring to tree bark, listeners tend to associate the word with that meaning—even though it is less frequent—rather than its more dominant meaning ("dog’s bark"). This phenomenon, known as word meaning priming, can last for hours or even days, suggesting that previous experience can alter the listener’s probabilistic estimates about what a word probably means. In a series of experimental studies, we investigated whether this effect also depends on the identity of the speaker. Participants heard one speaker (e.g., a chef) consistently using ambiguous words (like pot) to refer to things related to cooking (cooking pot) in a thematically related context (cooking dinner for a birthday party). After that, participants heard a speaker (who could be the same or a different speaker) asking "which picture goes best with the word pot?" Participants had to pick the image that answered the question. We found that when the speaker was the same in both tasks, participants picked the image that was related to the primed sense (i.e. the cooking pot) more often than when there was no previous story. However, when the speaker was different in each task, the probability of selecting the primed meaning significantly decreased, even when both speakers were chefs. This result suggests that listeners sometimes retain previous uses of a word by one speaker for future encounters with the same speaker. However, if a different speaker—even another chef—uses the same word, listeners tend to access the more frequent meaning of the word (“plant pot”) again. We interpret this result as meaning that experience with specific individuals talking about a given topic shapes semantic expectations in future interactions with that same person.These expectations do not transfer to other speakers and even when the two speakers belong to the same group (such as being a chef) is not enough to generalize the interpretation from one speaker to another. Thus, access to meaning may be partly shaped by local, personal, and dynamic experiences with individual speakers. This invites us to consider that the mental lexicon is flexible and that semantic access may partially be speaker specific.