Lexico-semantic interactions during the visual and spoken recognition of homonymous Korean Eojeols*

Abstract

The present study investigated the mental representation and processing of an ambiguous word in the bimodal processing system by manipulating the lexical ambiguity of a visually or auditorily presented word. Homonyms (e.g., ‘물었다’) with more than two meanings and control words (e.g., ‘고통을’) with a single meaning were used in the experiments. The lemma frequency of words was manipulated while the relative frequency of multiple meanings of each homonym was balanced. In both experiments using the lexical decision task, a robust frequency effect and a critical interaction of word type by frequency were found. In Experiment 1, spoken homonyms yielded faster latencies relative to control words (i.e., ambiguity advantage) in the low frequency condition, while ambiguity disadvantage was found in the high frequency condition. A similar interactive pattern was found in visually presented homonyms in the subsequent Experiment 2. Taken together, the first key finding is that interdependent lexico-semantic processing can be found both in the visual and auditory processing system, which in turn suggests that semantic processing is not modality dependent, but rather takes place on the basis of general lexical knowledge. The second is that multiple semantic candidates provide facilitative feedback only when the lemma frequency of the word is relatively low.