I am investigating polysemy using semantic priming paradigms. Usually, context words appear before a prime word, biasing its interpretation (between alternative senses). However I would like to use a context word after the prime, and before target. Do you know any experiments like this?
If you're not familiar with Rachel Giora's work on graded salience you might find it relevant.
If you haven't done so yet, do have a look at Klein & Murphy (2001, JML), Foraker & Murphy (2012, JML), and Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero (2008, JEP: LMC).
Best of luck,
Steven
Interesting, because my own work during the late seventies and eighties of last century was concerned with the dynamics of lexical and knowledge structures as derived from statistical analyses of masses of NL discourse texts. You may try e.g.
>> Rieger, Burghard B.: ''Feasible Fuzzy Semantics. On some problems of how to handle word meaning empirically'' in: Eikmeyer, H.J./ Rieser, H. (eds.): Words, Worlds, and Contexts. New Approaches in Word Semantics (Research in Text Theory 6), Berlin/New York (W. de Gruyter) 1981, pp. 193-209
>> Rieger, Burghard B.: ''Procedural Meaning Representation. An empirical approach to word semantics and analogical inferencing'' in: Horecky, J. (ed.): COLING 82 - Proceedings 9th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, [Linguistic Series 47], Amsterdam/ New York/ Oxford (North Holland) 1982, pp. 319-324
>> Rieger, Burghard B.: ''Semantic Relevance and Aspect Dependancy in a Given Subject Domain'' in: Walker, D.E. (ed.): COLING 84 - Proceedings 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Stanford (ACL Publ) 1984, pp. 298-301
[Full-text downloads from my homepage]
Good luck and have fun,
BBR
Thank you for your suggestions. I am already familiar with Klein & Murphy's papers, and I've recently came upon a couple of papers by Klepousniotou (thought not that one, thanks!). A friend of mine pointed out to me these papers: Joordens and Becker (1997; JEP LMC),and Becker Moscoivtch, Behrmann & Joordens (idem).
Oh! Steven Frisson! You haven't recommended your own work! I found it now, Frisson & Pickering, 1999..., P&F2001...
Oh well, I didn't think they were that relevant for your question. (But F&P, 2007 - Language & Cognitive Processes, might be of interest to you.)
I am writing up something that might be more relevant: an eye-tracking study in which a particular sense was either kept unspecified, was repeated, or was switched.
- ... the book was scary/bound...
- ... the science-fiction book was scary / gift-wrapped book was bound...
- ... bound book was scary / scary book was bound...
Interesting results, but a bit too complicated to describe here (in line with the idea of underspecification though, luckily). It's intended for a special issue in Lingua to appear at the end of the year/next year.
Best of luck,
Steven
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