PSYC 3290 Final: Psycholinguistics Final Exam Review.docx

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 3290
• Professor: Justin Friesen

Document Summary

Ambiguity in language arises in a number of ways, there are ambiguities associated with the segmentation of speech. Some sentences have more than one acceptable syntactic interpretation. Homophones are 2 words that sound the same. Heterographic homophones are 2 words with different spellings that sound the same. Homographs are different words that are spelled the same; they may or may not be pronounced differently. Polysemous words are words that have more than one meaning. We are faster to make lexical decisions about ambiguous words compared with matched unambiguous words; this advantage is called the ambiguity advantage. In the dichotic learning task, different messages are presented to the left and right ears. Participants are then told to attend to one ear and ignore the other. Afterwards the participants were asked to paraphrase the attended message; it was found that their interpretation was affected by the unattended message that disambiguated the ambiguous phrase. (mackay and.