Why do new meanings occur

However, the event-related potential ERP data showed that accessing the new meanings was still mainly supported by episodic retrieval even 24 hours after learning. To investigate how new meanings are associated with known words, Study 2a first demonstrated that presenting word meanings as verbal definitions were sufficient to drive a semantic category effect.

Based on this result, Study 2b further showed that the left pMTG, in addition to sensorimotor cortices relevant to the representation of new meanings, was involved in binding new meanings to known words. Combined with the previous findings on learning novel words, the results suggest that the co-activation of new and prior knowledge is essential to the integration of new word knowledge into the mental lexicon.

The left pMTG not only supports the formation of novel form-meaning associations, but also the associations between new meanings and previously known words. More Filters. Lexical variation, lexical innovation, and speaker motivations: a historical psycholinguistic approach. Highly Influenced. View 5 excerpts, cites background and methods.

Recent Semantic Changes for the Term "Digital". View 6 excerpts, cites methods and background. View 4 excerpts, cites background. Observations on the changing language of accounting. Your documents are now available to view. Confirm Cancel. From the book Historical Semantics and Cognition.

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Showing a limited preview of this publication:. Chapter Historical Semantics and Cognition Why do new meanings occur? First, we must rule out the possibility that this relatedness effect reflects a difference in how well these two types of words are learned.

A subset analysis of Experiment 3 that only included those items for which an individual participant had learned something about the new meaning as measured by the cued-recall task showed a significant effect of relatedness on the lexical decision task. This indicates that the semantic-relatedness effect on lexical decision performance is present even for items that are equally well learned. Instead, we propose that the relatedness effect reflects the same underlying mechanisms as the meaning relatedness effects seen for well-established ambiguous words Beretta et al.

These effects have been modelled within a distributed connectionist model Rodd et al. The present experiments cannot conclusively determine the extent to which the relatedness effect represents either facilitation from the related meaning or interference from the unrelated meaning.

Future studies that include a set of baseline, unambiguous words that are presented along with their existing meanings during training may address this issue, provided that the studies ensure equal exposure to these existing meanings and to the meanings to be learned. For now, we suggest that the relatedness effect observed here reflects some combination of these two effects.

Interestingly, a comparable relatedness effect was not seen in the lexical decision component of Experiment 2, which used a similar length of training 7 days but relatively superficial rating tasks during training.

We therefore speculate that a high level of semantic engagement may be a necessary requirement for participants to integrate newly acquired meanings with their existing lexical knowledge.

The effect is particularly striking given that participants had not encountered the new meanings since the previous day. This finding is consistent with data from recent priming experiments Rodd et al. Taken together, these data suggest that even strongly subordinate meanings can influence performance if they have been recently encountered i.

These effects of meaning relatedness on both explicit memory tasks and an online recognition task provide an interesting extension to the earlier lexical decision results that have shown a disadvantage for highly familiar ambiguous words whose meanings are semantically unrelated Beretta et al.

The results of the present experiments also indicate that meaning relatedness has a pervasive influence on lexical processing that emerges in the earliest stages of acquisition Exp. We suggest that the effects of meaning relatedness on both the acquisition and the subsequent processing of ambiguous words are a consequence of a single learning mechanism that is responsible for the long-term storage of newly learned and existing words cf.

In particular, we propose that the difficulty in learning one-to-many mappings for ambiguous words with unrelated meanings that we have observed in these experiments directly results in a residual difficulty in processing these words, even when they are well established within the lexicon.

This view is consistent with our distributed connectionist model of how ambiguous words are processed Rodd et al. Several unanswered questions remain. Previous work has shown that learning fictional facts about famous people can increase the time taken to verify existing true facts about them Lewis and Anderson, , suggesting that learning new meanings may come at a cost for the retrieval of the existing meanings, just as learning new word forms can interfere with recognition of existing forms Gaskell and Dumay, Further work will also be needed in order to determine how recall of these newly acquired word meanings compares to recall of items without a preexisting meaning i.

Finally, these data have potential consequences for real-world learning of ambiguous words during childhood. They suggest that learning a new word meaning might be particularly challenging for children if they already have a different, semantically unrelated meaning associated with that word.

Future work across the lifespan will be needed in order to fully understand how both children and adults are able to learn such words and to determine the factors that contribute to successful learning.

These data are also a useful reminder that the majority of words in language are highly ambiguous and that to fully explain how words and their meanings are learned, represented, and processed requires that we take the nature of such ambiguities into account.

One participant was excluded from this analysis due to not recalling any correct properties for the unrelated items.

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