Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Behavioral evidence supports the claim that in the absence of a strongly biasing context multiple meanings of an ambiguous word are activated, particularly when the two meanings occur with equal frequency. A simple constraint satisfaction system, based on a Hopfield network and incorporating a distributed memory scheme, is shown to account for results from a cross modal priming paradigm typically interpreted as evidence for multiple access. The model demonstrates that the power of an ambiguous word to facilitate identification of targets related to either of its two meanings m a y be produced by selective activation of just one meaning. Selective activation is driven by simultaneous processing of the ambiguous prime and the associated target word, with the unambiguous target determining the appropriate interpretation of the prime. The model also provides the basis for a reinterpretation of a number of other empirical results concerning lexical ambiguity resolution.