The use of acoustic information in lexical ambiguity resolution: an event-related potential study.

Words that can be used as both noun and verb create regions of syntactic ambiguity that could create processing challenges for listeners. However, acoustic properties, such as duration, differ between noun and verb uses of such words, and listeners may use these differences to facilitate ambiguity processing. In this study, we replaced noun uses of ambiguous words with verb uses to determine whether these manipulations affected the N400 event-related potential, which is associated with semantic violations, or the P600 component, which is associated with syntactic ambiguity. The results suggest that the acoustic differences between noun/verb polysemes mitigate the extent to which these words are perceived as ambiguous, although the results do not indicate whether replacing one with the other produces a meaning violation. Durational differences in noun/verb polysemes may affect their processing in fluent speech.

Neural responses to category ambiguous words.

Category ambiguous words (like hug and swing) have the potential to complicate both learning and processing of language. However, uses of such words may be disambiguated by acoustic differences that depend on the category of use. This article uses an event-related potential (ERP) technique to ask whether adult native speakers of English show neural sensitivity to those differences. The results indicate that noun and verb tokens of ambiguous words produce differences in the amplitude of the ERP response over left anterior sites as early as 100ms following stimulus onset and persisting for over 400ms. Nonsense words extracted from noun and verb contexts do not show such differences. These findings suggest that the acoustic differences between noun and verb tokens of ambiguous words are perceived and processed by adults and may be part of the lexical representation of the word.