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...ord-meaning priming effect reflects a non-specific form of semantic priming, such that the recent encounter with this sentence has enhanced processing of any subsequent information that is semantically related to the topic of the sentence. This would be directly analogous to a conventional semantic priming task in which a single encounter with the prime word ‘‘doctor’’ produces facilitation ofPlease cite this article in press as: Rodd, J. M., et al. Long-term priming guage (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.002subsequent processing of semantically related words such as ‘‘nurse’’ (Collins & Loftus, 1975). Under this semantic priming account, participants are not learning about the ambiguous word itself, but instead their increased preference for one of its meanings reflects priming of all semantic representations related to the meaning of the sentence that they previously encountered. The considerable delay between priming and test (more than 20 min) in Experiment 1 makes the latter explanation somewhat unlikely – there are few demonstrations of semantic priming effects that span multiple intervening items, let alone an extended period including an engaging distractor task and a change of tas...

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...on-homographic homophones (a word that is spelt differently but has the same pronunciation to another word with a distinct meaning, e.g., ‘‘knight/ night’’). An additional 10 filler words were selected that were not ambiguous but were otherwise similar to the experimental items. Audio files for the ambiguous and filler words were recorded individually by a female speaker of British English (JMR). The stimuli used in the digit span task comprised 63 randomly-generated number strings (ranging from 3 to 9 digits in length). Finally, a paper version of the adult Mill Hill Vocabulary scale (SET A; Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998) in a multiple-choice format was given to all participants. Design and procedure A between subjects design was used in which participants either took part in the unprimed or in the primed condition. All participants were first asked to complete the Mill Hill Vocabulary scale and a language background form in order to assess vocabulary and ensure that participants were native speakers of British English. All subsequent parts of the experiment were presented using EPrime 1.1 (Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2002) on a computer monitor for the visual word probes and the digit span task, and th...

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... context) participants are biased to retrieve the word’s more frequent meaning (e.g., Twilley, Dixon, Taylor, & Clark, 1994). Numerous studies have demonstrated the influence of dominance on readers’ ability to resolve ambiguities within sentence contexts. When an ambiguous word occurs in a neutral context, in which both meanings are plausible (e.g., ‘‘The man knew that the pen . . .’’), reading times show that readers are biased to retrieve the more frequent meaning, and show particular difficulty in selecting a meaning for those ambiguous words that have two equally frequent meanings (e.g., Rayner & Duffy, 1986). There are also strong effects of dominance for sentences where the ambiguous word is preceded by a constraining context (e.g., ‘‘The man enclosed the livestock with the pen’’), such that increases in reading times (relative to an unambiguous base-of the meanings of ambiguous words. Journal of Memory and Lan2 J.M. Rodd et al. / Journal of Memory and Language xxx (2012) xxx–xxxline) only occur when the less frequent (subordinate) meaning is used (e.g., Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988). Although the importance of meaning dominance is undisputed, very little is known about the nature of these pref...

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...digit span (r = .007, p > .9).of the meanings of ambiguous words. Journal of Memory and Lan8 J.M. Rodd et al. / Journal of Memory and Language xxx (2012) xxx–xxxIn the second stage of the analysis, we compared the consistency scores in the same-voice condition (consistency mean = 0.37) and the different-voice condition (consistency mean = 0.38). Analyses of variance (ANOVAs) were conducted, with voice as a within subject variable. Version was included as a dummy variable, but main effects and interactions with version are not reported as they are not central to the issue under investigation (Pollatsek & Well, 1995). The main effect of voice was found to be non-significant: there was no difference between the same voice and the different voice conditions (both F < 1). Repeated word analyses As in Experiment 1, responses from the word association task were then classified as to whether they occurred either within the corresponding prime sentence or were used as the visual probe word. These ‘repeated word’ and ‘probe word’ responses constituted 6.5% of all responses. Once these responses had been removed the data were analysed as in the main analysis. These analyses showed the same pattern of results as th...

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... digits in length). Finally, a paper version of the adult Mill Hill Vocabulary scale (SET A; Raven, Raven, & Court, 1998) in a multiple-choice format was given to all participants. Design and procedure A between subjects design was used in which participants either took part in the unprimed or in the primed condition. All participants were first asked to complete the Mill Hill Vocabulary scale and a language background form in order to assess vocabulary and ensure that participants were native speakers of British English. All subsequent parts of the experiment were presented using EPrime 1.1 (Schneider, Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2002) on a computer monitor for the visual word probes and the digit span task, and through headphones for the spoken stimuli. Responses were recorded via a standard keyboard. Those participants in the primed condition performed three separate experimental tasks: (i) semantic relatedness judgements to auditory sentences (approximately 6 min),1 (ii) digit span (approximately 8 min), (iii) word association (approximately 18 min). Those participants in the unprimed condition (baseline group) only performed the word association task. During the first task participants were unaware that they would late...

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...how particular difficulty in selecting a meaning for those ambiguous words that have two equally frequent meanings (e.g., Rayner & Duffy, 1986). There are also strong effects of dominance for sentences where the ambiguous word is preceded by a constraining context (e.g., ‘‘The man enclosed the livestock with the pen’’), such that increases in reading times (relative to an unambiguous base-of the meanings of ambiguous words. Journal of Memory and Lan2 J.M. Rodd et al. / Journal of Memory and Language xxx (2012) xxx–xxxline) only occur when the less frequent (subordinate) meaning is used (e.g., Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988). Although the importance of meaning dominance is undisputed, very little is known about the nature of these preferences, how they arise and are maintained over time. One possibility is that they reflect a stable property of longterm lexical–semantic representations that develop incrementally over a lifetime’s linguistic experience. This view is to some extent implied by the publication of dominance norms (e.g., Twilley et al., 1994), which list the relative frequencies of the different meanings of ambiguous words. These lists are founded on the tacit assumption that meaning preferences for a...

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...eading impairment took part in the study. They were recruited using a University College London online recruiting system and were paid for their participation. One participant was excluded due to poor performance on the vocabulary test. Twenty-nine participants (9 male; mean age = 22.8 years, SD = 9.3) were allocated to the unprimed (baseline) condition; and 30 participants (10 male; mean age = 24.2 years, SD = 7.7) took part in the primed condition.Materials The experimental materials for the priming phase consisted of 59 spoken sentences taken from the stimuli used in a previous fMRI study (Rodd, Davis, & Johnsrude, 2005) and a study of dual task interference (Rodd, Johnsrude, & Davis, 2010). The sentences (mean length = 9.3 words) were spoken by a British English female speaker and each contained two ambiguous words that were disambiguated within the sentence (e.g., ‘‘the steak was rare just as the customer has requested’’; see Appendix A for full list of sentences). Where possible the subordinate meaning of the ambiguous words was used in order to maximise the potential for increasing participants’ preferences for these meanings. However, detailed information about the dominance of these meanings for this p...

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...logous to the lexically-driven retuning of phoneme representations shown in studies of perceptual learning of speech (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003). In this work, presentation of an ambiguous phoneme (e.g., a fricative midway between /s/ and /f/) in lexically-constrained contexts (such as at the offset of words like beef or peace), produces a lasting change to participants’ interpretations of ambiguous /s/–/f/ segments presented in isolation. Whereas top-down interactions between lexical and phonemic processing during online processing remain controversial (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000; McClelland, Mirman, & Holt, 2006), all are agreed that long-term learning can only be plausibly explained by a form of top-down, lexically-driven perceptual retuning (see Davis, Johnsrude, HervaisAdelman, Taylor, and McGettigan (2005) and McQueen, Norris, and Cutler (2006) for further discussion and related evidence). We note that this parallel between lexical/ semantic and phonemic ambiguity resolution is consistent with arguments made by Mirman and colleagues (Mirman, 2008; Mirman, McClelland, & Holt, 2006). There is also a useful parallel to be drawn between these results and the finding reported by Monsell and Hirsh (199...

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...at they previously encountered. The considerable delay between priming and test (more than 20 min) in Experiment 1 makes the latter explanation somewhat unlikely – there are few demonstrations of semantic priming effects that span multiple intervening items, let alone an extended period including an engaging distractor task and a change of task between prime and target processing. Even those effects referred to in the literature as ‘long-term semantic priming’ use a considerably shorter delay between the prime and its corresponding target than was used in the current experiments. For example, Becker et al. (1997) used a design in which there was a 2 min pause between the blocks of prime items and target items, and the longest average lag between prime and targets in their experiments was 21.5 items. However because no previous studies have assessed long-term semantic priming using a word association measure we cannot completely rule out the possibility that the current word-meaning priming effects might reflect a general semantic priming effect. In Experiment 3 we will directly address this issue by comparing the extent to which the word-meaning priming effect is contingent on the presence of the crit...

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...evier Inc. All rights reserved.Introduction One factor that is known to be important in this disam-Understanding natural speech requires that we retrieve and combine the meanings of individual words so as to construct a representation of the meaning of a whole sentence. The presence of ambiguous words (e.g., bark) makes these processes more difficult since the listener must use contextual information to identify the appropriate meaning (e.g., ‘‘bark of a dog/tree’’). Semantic ambiguity is ubiquitous in language, with over 80% of common English words having more than one dictionary definition (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002). The cognitive processes involved in ambiguity resolution form a critical, and much studied, part of our language comprehension system (see Twilley & Dixon, 2000).. All rights reserved. Cognitive, Perceptual Language Sciences, . Fax: +44 020 7436 et al. Long-term priming 012.08.002biguation process is the relative frequencies of the ambiguous word’s different meanings, also known as dominance. For example the word ‘‘pen’’ has a high-frequency meaning (a writing implement) and a low-frequency meaning (enclosure for animals). In simple word association tasks (in the absence of any relevant con...

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...ed in the sentences. The primed results reflect the preference for these meanings when the sentences were previously heard during the meaning relatedness task. (b) The variation of priming as a function of the unprimed (baseline) scores. The 113 items were grouped into six categories (of approximately equal size; N = 18/19) on the basis of their unprimed consistency score. 2 Exc subjects 3 This measure is suitable for data where the outcome is a dichotomous variable, i.e. each participant’s response either is or is not consistent with the meaning of the word that was used in the sentence (see Haddock, Rindskopf, & Shadish, 1998), and the measure expresses the change in the likelihood of the two response categories (consistent/inconsistent) on a numerical scale that is independent of the overall rate of consistent responses. Log odds ratio is calculated as ln(p1/(1 p1))/(p2/(1 p2)), J.M. Rodd et al. / Journal of Memory and Language xxx (2012) xxx–xxx 5 Please guageAll responses were coded according to whether they were consistent with the meaning used in the sentence from the priming phase or another meaning. For example, the homophone item ‘‘knight/ night’’ had appeared in the priming phase within the sentence ‘...

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...allowing a comparison of the degree of word-meaning priming produced by same- and different-voice sentence presentations. The predictions for this contrast are clear-cut. If the word-meaning priming effect reflects a modulation of abstract lexical–semantic representations then we would not expect the identity of the speaker to play an important role as, according to most models of speech comprehension, this type of perceptual detail is not preserved at a lexical– semantic level of representation. Correspondingly, voice change manipulations do not appear to modulate lexical repetition priming (Luce & Lyons, 1998; Jackson & Morton, 1984). In contrast if the effect reflects a form of episodic learning, whereby responses during the word association task are biased by participants’ retrieval of an episodic memory trace of the training sentence, then it is likely that the same-voice condition would provide a stronger retrieval cue. Consistent with this prediction, existing data shows that effects of voice repetition are more pronounced in tests of recognition memory for spoken words (Luce & Lyons, 1998) and that voice-effects on priming are absent in amnesic patients (Schacter & Church, 1995). Evidence of...

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...d within the same short paragraph of text, means that we cannot necessarily infer a long-term change in participants’ meaning preferences for ambiguous words. This effect may not reflect a change to the lexical–semantic representation that occurs when the ambiguous word is first encountered, but instead may reflect a contextual/semantic primingPlease cite this article in press as: Rodd, J. M., et al. Long-term priming guage (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.002effect that occurs on the second presentation. Consistent with this alternative explanation, an additional experiment by Rayner et al. (1994; Experiment 1) that used a longer delay between initial exposure and test showed only limited effects of prior exposure. In this experiment, participants learned paired-associates that included eight strongly biased ambiguous words together with words related to their subordinate meaning (e.g., bank-river). In a later part of the experiment, they then read sentences that contained the ambiguous words in subordinate biasing contexts. Initial gaze duration for the critical words (e.g., bank) showed the expected processing disadvantage compared with an unambiguous baseline, and there was no effe...

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...n of the degree of word-meaning priming produced by same- and different-voice sentence presentations. The predictions for this contrast are clear-cut. If the word-meaning priming effect reflects a modulation of abstract lexical–semantic representations then we would not expect the identity of the speaker to play an important role as, according to most models of speech comprehension, this type of perceptual detail is not preserved at a lexical– semantic level of representation. Correspondingly, voice change manipulations do not appear to modulate lexical repetition priming (Luce & Lyons, 1998; Jackson & Morton, 1984). In contrast if the effect reflects a form of episodic learning, whereby responses during the word association task are biased by participants’ retrieval of an episodic memory trace of the training sentence, then it is likely that the same-voice condition would provide a stronger retrieval cue. Consistent with this prediction, existing data shows that effects of voice repetition are more pronounced in tests of recognition memory for spoken words (Luce & Lyons, 1998) and that voice-effects on priming are absent in amnesic patients (Schacter & Church, 1995). Evidence of episodic memory involvem...

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...current study reflects an improvement in their ability to map from the input (wordform) stimulus to the semantic representation that was appropriate in the prime sentence. More specifically, we suggest that as a consequence of the initial encounter with the ambiguous words, listeners strengthen the association between a word’s form (phonological for our experiments since they used spoken presentation) and the representation of the meaning that was accessed during sentence comprehension. This explanation is consistent with distributed connectionist models of how ambiguous words are recognised (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004; Kawamoto, Farrar, & Kello, 1994; Joordens & Besner, 1994). These models characterise word recognition as a process by which distributed representations of word forms are mapped onto distributed representations of meaning (semantics). For example, in the Rodd et al. (2004) model, which was primarily concerned with modelling data from single word recognition tasks (Rodd et al., 2002; Rodd, 2004), when the form of an ambiguous word is encountered, this activation feeds forward to activate the semantic units that are associated with its meanings. Initially, this pattern of semantic activation co...

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...als The sentences used in the priming phases of the experiment consisted of 54 newly developed pairs of wordmeaning and semantic prime sentences (mean length = 11.9 words). The word-meaning primes each contained an ambiguous word that was disambiguated towards its subordinate meaning (e.g., ‘‘The man accepted the post in the accountancy firm’’; see Appendix B for the sentences). The ambiguous words were either non-homographic homophones (e.g., ‘‘prophet/profit’’) or homonyms (e.g., ‘‘deck’’). The subordinate meaning was selected on the basis of dominance norms (Gawlick-Grendell & Woltz, 1994; Nelson, McEvoy, Walling, & Wheeler, 1980; Sereno, Pacht, & Rayner, 1992; Twilley et al., 1994). The corresponding semantic prime sentences were identical except that the ambiguous word was replaced with a low-ambiguity word with essentially the same meaning in that context (e.g., ‘‘The man accepted the job in the accountancy firm’’). In order to create the six versions of the experiment (see ‘‘Design and procedure’’), the 54 pairs of sentences were divided into six sets of nine sentences. Each version of the experiment contained one of these sets in each of the six conditions, counterbalanced across versions such that each set only ...

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...uch studied, part of our language comprehension system (see Twilley & Dixon, 2000).. All rights reserved. Cognitive, Perceptual Language Sciences, . Fax: +44 020 7436 et al. Long-term priming 012.08.002biguation process is the relative frequencies of the ambiguous word’s different meanings, also known as dominance. For example the word ‘‘pen’’ has a high-frequency meaning (a writing implement) and a low-frequency meaning (enclosure for animals). In simple word association tasks (in the absence of any relevant context) participants are biased to retrieve the word’s more frequent meaning (e.g., Twilley, Dixon, Taylor, & Clark, 1994). Numerous studies have demonstrated the influence of dominance on readers’ ability to resolve ambiguities within sentence contexts. When an ambiguous word occurs in a neutral context, in which both meanings are plausible (e.g., ‘‘The man knew that the pen . . .’’), reading times show that readers are biased to retrieve the more frequent meaning, and show particular difficulty in selecting a meaning for those ambiguous words that have two equally frequent meanings (e.g., Rayner & Duffy, 1986). There are also strong effects of dominance for sentences where the ambiguous word is preceded by a c...

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...nput (wordform) stimulus to the semantic representation that was appropriate in the prime sentence. More specifically, we suggest that as a consequence of the initial encounter with the ambiguous words, listeners strengthen the association between a word’s form (phonological for our experiments since they used spoken presentation) and the representation of the meaning that was accessed during sentence comprehension. This explanation is consistent with distributed connectionist models of how ambiguous words are recognised (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004; Kawamoto, Farrar, & Kello, 1994; Joordens & Besner, 1994). These models characterise word recognition as a process by which distributed representations of word forms are mapped onto distributed representations of meaning (semantics). For example, in the Rodd et al. (2004) model, which was primarily concerned with modelling data from single word recognition tasks (Rodd et al., 2002; Rodd, 2004), when the form of an ambiguous word is encountered, this activation feeds forward to activate the semantic units that are associated with its meanings. Initially, this pattern of semantic activation corresponds to a blend (or mixture) of its two meanings, but ...

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...ant studies use a lexical decision task to explore the effect of repeated presentation. A number of studies have shown that for word pairs that include ambiguous words (e.g., ‘‘bank-money’’), participants were faster to respond to the second word in the pair when they had previously encountered a word pair that used the same meaning of the ambiguous word compared to trials using a different meaning (e.g., responses were faster following ‘‘bank-save’’ than following ‘‘bank-stream’’). To date, such studies have shown effects that persist across 12 intervening word pairs (Simpson & Kellas, 1989; Simpson & Kang, 1994; Copland, 2006). Similarly, Masson and Freedman (1990) found a robust repetition priming effect for second presentations of ambiguous words preceded by a disambiguating word, only when both presentations used the same meaning (e.g., ‘‘piano-organ’’ primed responses to ‘‘music-organ’’ but not ‘‘transplant-organ’’). The same effect was observed when, at test, ambiguous words were used as the primes and not as the targets: responses were faster for ‘same-meaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘haystraw’’ primed ‘‘straw-barn’’) compared with ‘differentmeaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘hay-straw’’ followed by ‘‘strawdrink’...

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..., Mirman, & Holt, 2006), all are agreed that long-term learning can only be plausibly explained by a form of top-down, lexically-driven perceptual retuning (see Davis, Johnsrude, HervaisAdelman, Taylor, and McGettigan (2005) and McQueen, Norris, and Cutler (2006) for further discussion and related evidence). We note that this parallel between lexical/ semantic and phonemic ambiguity resolution is consistent with arguments made by Mirman and colleagues (Mirman, 2008; Mirman, McClelland, & Holt, 2006). There is also a useful parallel to be drawn between these results and the finding reported by Monsell and Hirsh (1998) that response times increase for a monosyllabic word (e.g., ‘‘bran’’) when it is preceded by a word that shares its onset and vowel (e.g., ‘‘brag’’). This effect was seen with lags of more than 5 min between prime and probe and was also found for similar pairs of polysyllabic words that share their first syllable (e.g., ‘‘beacon-beaker’’). This ‘competitive priming’ effect is only seen when both the prime and targets are real words. The authors suggest that ‘‘successful recognition of a word makes that same word easier to recognise on the next encounter, at least for several minutes, but at t...

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... about the extent to which recent experience with an ambiguous word can influence this measure of meaning preference. However, a number of other experimental paradigms have provided evidence consistent with the idea that previous encounters with an ambiguous word in context can affect its subsequent processing. Experiments that assess changes in reading time between first and subsequent presentations of ambiguous words have provided inconsistent evidence of changes in meaning preference. This may be because the initial dominance of a word’s meaning is a critical factor in determining priming. Binder and Morris (1995) have shown that if readers encounter an ambiguous word that has two equally frequent meanings twice within the same passage of text, then gaze durations on the second instance are shorter if the meaning used for the ambiguous word is kept the same, compared with conditions where they had either not previously encountered the ambiguous word or where the alternative meaning of the ambiguous word had been presented. In contrast, Rayner, Pacht, and Duffy (1994; Experiment 2) found no equivalent benefit in reading times for second presentations of a biased ambiguous word where both presentations o...

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...ning priming effect, which remains robust after a delay of 20 min. This finding that word-meaning priming is contingent on the repeated presentation of the same ambiguous word in both the prime sentence and as a target word suggests that this word-meaning priming paradigm is more closely allied to repetition priming effects, which are known to be long lasting (e.g. lasting a year in studies of picture naming; Cave, 1997). Interestingly, studies using pictures indicate that long-term repetition priming effects may often depend on close overlap between the tasks performed during study and test (Vriezen, Moscovitch, & Bellos, 1995; Horner & Henson, 2009). However, while the present experiments use very different tasks during the study phase (sentence comprehension) and the test phase (word association), it could be argued that just as ‘standard’ long-term repetition priming paradigms reflect an improvement in participants ability to map from the input stimulus to an output response, the current study reflects an improvement in their ability to map from the input (wordform) stimulus to the semantic representation that was appropriate in the prime sentence. More specifically, we suggest that as a consequence of the initi...

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...e the effect of repeated presentation. A number of studies have shown that for word pairs that include ambiguous words (e.g., ‘‘bank-money’’), participants were faster to respond to the second word in the pair when they had previously encountered a word pair that used the same meaning of the ambiguous word compared to trials using a different meaning (e.g., responses were faster following ‘‘bank-save’’ than following ‘‘bank-stream’’). To date, such studies have shown effects that persist across 12 intervening word pairs (Simpson & Kellas, 1989; Simpson & Kang, 1994; Copland, 2006). Similarly, Masson and Freedman (1990) found a robust repetition priming effect for second presentations of ambiguous words preceded by a disambiguating word, only when both presentations used the same meaning (e.g., ‘‘piano-organ’’ primed responses to ‘‘music-organ’’ but not ‘‘transplant-organ’’). The same effect was observed when, at test, ambiguous words were used as the primes and not as the targets: responses were faster for ‘same-meaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘haystraw’’ primed ‘‘straw-barn’’) compared with ‘differentmeaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘hay-straw’’ followed by ‘‘strawdrink’’). In all these experiments, however, the critical rep...

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...etween lexical and phonemic processing during online processing remain controversial (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000; McClelland, Mirman, & Holt, 2006), all are agreed that long-term learning can only be plausibly explained by a form of top-down, lexically-driven perceptual retuning (see Davis, Johnsrude, HervaisAdelman, Taylor, and McGettigan (2005) and McQueen, Norris, and Cutler (2006) for further discussion and related evidence). We note that this parallel between lexical/ semantic and phonemic ambiguity resolution is consistent with arguments made by Mirman and colleagues (Mirman, 2008; Mirman, McClelland, & Holt, 2006). There is also a useful parallel to be drawn between these results and the finding reported by Monsell and Hirsh (1998) that response times increase for a monosyllabic word (e.g., ‘‘bran’’) when it is preceded by a word that shares its onset and vowel (e.g., ‘‘brag’’). This effect was seen with lags of more than 5 min between prime and probe and was also found for similar pairs of polysyllabic words that share their first syllable (e.g., ‘‘beacon-beaker’’). This ‘competitive priming’ effect is only seen when both the prime and targets are real words. The authors suggest that ‘‘successful rec...

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...es of the experiment consisted of 54 newly developed pairs of wordmeaning and semantic prime sentences (mean length = 11.9 words). The word-meaning primes each contained an ambiguous word that was disambiguated towards its subordinate meaning (e.g., ‘‘The man accepted the post in the accountancy firm’’; see Appendix B for the sentences). The ambiguous words were either non-homographic homophones (e.g., ‘‘prophet/profit’’) or homonyms (e.g., ‘‘deck’’). The subordinate meaning was selected on the basis of dominance norms (Gawlick-Grendell & Woltz, 1994; Nelson, McEvoy, Walling, & Wheeler, 1980; Sereno, Pacht, & Rayner, 1992; Twilley et al., 1994). The corresponding semantic prime sentences were identical except that the ambiguous word was replaced with a low-ambiguity word with essentially the same meaning in that context (e.g., ‘‘The man accepted the job in the accountancy firm’’). In order to create the six versions of the experiment (see ‘‘Design and procedure’’), the 54 pairs of sentences were divided into six sets of nine sentences. Each version of the experiment contained one of these sets in each of the six conditions, counterbalanced across versions such that each set only occurred in a particular condit...

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...cts the early stages of listeners’ long-term learning about word meanings. Future studies using a longer delay (days or weeks) between training and test are needed to reveal the time-course of this effect and to characterise how listeners integrate their recent and distant experiences with words and their meanings. Of clear relevance here is recent evidence about the time-course of lexical consolidation, which suggests that new information is only consolidated into the lexicon over a longer time-scale than in the current experiment, and that sleep may play a critical role in this process (see Davis and Gaskell (2010) for review). The evidence used to support this view of lexical consolidation comes primarily from studies in which participants are required to learn the phonological forms of lexical items that are entirely new to them. However, we have recently shown that competition from recently learned meanings similarly involves an extended period of learning (Rodd et al., 2012). This contrasts with the short-term re-tuning of previously established lexical representations explored here. It will be for future studies to determine whether or not short-term and longer-term retuning involves the same learn...

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...n their ability to map from the input (wordform) stimulus to the semantic representation that was appropriate in the prime sentence. More specifically, we suggest that as a consequence of the initial encounter with the ambiguous words, listeners strengthen the association between a word’s form (phonological for our experiments since they used spoken presentation) and the representation of the meaning that was accessed during sentence comprehension. This explanation is consistent with distributed connectionist models of how ambiguous words are recognised (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004; Kawamoto, Farrar, & Kello, 1994; Joordens & Besner, 1994). These models characterise word recognition as a process by which distributed representations of word forms are mapped onto distributed representations of meaning (semantics). For example, in the Rodd et al. (2004) model, which was primarily concerned with modelling data from single word recognition tasks (Rodd et al., 2002; Rodd, 2004), when the form of an ambiguous word is encountered, this activation feeds forward to activate the semantic units that are associated with its meanings. Initially, this pattern of semantic activation corresponds to a blend (or mixture)...

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...bust after a delay of 20 min. This finding that word-meaning priming is contingent on the repeated presentation of the same ambiguous word in both the prime sentence and as a target word suggests that this word-meaning priming paradigm is more closely allied to repetition priming effects, which are known to be long lasting (e.g. lasting a year in studies of picture naming; Cave, 1997). Interestingly, studies using pictures indicate that long-term repetition priming effects may often depend on close overlap between the tasks performed during study and test (Vriezen, Moscovitch, & Bellos, 1995; Horner & Henson, 2009). However, while the present experiments use very different tasks during the study phase (sentence comprehension) and the test phase (word association), it could be argued that just as ‘standard’ long-term repetition priming paradigms reflect an improvement in participants ability to map from the input stimulus to an output response, the current study reflects an improvement in their ability to map from the input (wordform) stimulus to the semantic representation that was appropriate in the prime sentence. More specifically, we suggest that as a consequence of the initial encounter with the am...

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..., but may also directly contribute to the development of long-term knowledge about the likelihood of any given meaning. This view is consistent with functional considerations concerning the role of priming mechanisms in supporting lexical knowledge, and with the claim thatPlease cite this article in press as: Rodd, J. M., et al. Long-term priming guage (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.002‘‘priming is a behavioural manifestation of learning processes embedded with perceptual (and sometimes conceptual) systems whose main function is to identify (or interpret) perceptual inputs’’ (Bowers & Kouider, 2003). In addition, this view of a speech comprehension system in which every encounter with a word’s form and its meaning results in a strengthening of the connection between these two representations has a direct parallel within the word production literature. In a model put forward to account for semantic interference effects in word production (i.e., slower naming of a picture of ‘‘dog’’ following naming of the semantically related picture ‘‘cat’’), Oppenheim, Dell, and Schwartz (2010) suggest that every time a word is produced there is a strengthening of the connections between the word’s sema...

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...ion of the meaning that was accessed during sentence comprehension. This explanation is consistent with distributed connectionist models of how ambiguous words are recognised (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2004; Kawamoto, Farrar, & Kello, 1994; Joordens & Besner, 1994). These models characterise word recognition as a process by which distributed representations of word forms are mapped onto distributed representations of meaning (semantics). For example, in the Rodd et al. (2004) model, which was primarily concerned with modelling data from single word recognition tasks (Rodd et al., 2002; Rodd, 2004), when the form of an ambiguous word is encountered, this activation feeds forward to activate the semantic units that are associated with its meanings. Initially, this pattern of semantic activation corresponds to a blend (or mixture) of its two meanings, but the recurrent connections between the individualPlease cite this article in press as: Rodd, J. M., et al. Long-term priming guage (2012), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.08.002semantic units then ‘clean up’ this activation to ensure that the network settles into a pattern of activation that corresponds to one of its known meanings. ...

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...epetition priming (Luce & Lyons, 1998; Jackson & Morton, 1984). In contrast if the effect reflects a form of episodic learning, whereby responses during the word association task are biased by participants’ retrieval of an episodic memory trace of the training sentence, then it is likely that the same-voice condition would provide a stronger retrieval cue. Consistent with this prediction, existing data shows that effects of voice repetition are more pronounced in tests of recognition memory for spoken words (Luce & Lyons, 1998) and that voice-effects on priming are absent in amnesic patients (Schacter & Church, 1995). Evidence of episodic memory involvement would therefore be provided if the meaning-priming effect were larger for ambiguous words presented in the same-voice as during the study phase.Experiment 2 Method Participants Twenty native British English speakers (4 male; mean age = 20.8 years, SD = 4.4) who had no reported hearing or reading impairment took part in the study. They were students at University College London (UCL) and were recruited using a UCL online recruiting system and given one course credit for taking part.Materials The sentences used during training in Experiment 1 were re-rec...

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...of individual words so as to construct a representation of the meaning of a whole sentence. The presence of ambiguous words (e.g., bark) makes these processes more difficult since the listener must use contextual information to identify the appropriate meaning (e.g., ‘‘bark of a dog/tree’’). Semantic ambiguity is ubiquitous in language, with over 80% of common English words having more than one dictionary definition (Rodd, Gaskell, & Marslen-Wilson, 2002). The cognitive processes involved in ambiguity resolution form a critical, and much studied, part of our language comprehension system (see Twilley & Dixon, 2000).. All rights reserved. Cognitive, Perceptual Language Sciences, . Fax: +44 020 7436 et al. Long-term priming 012.08.002biguation process is the relative frequencies of the ambiguous word’s different meanings, also known as dominance. For example the word ‘‘pen’’ has a high-frequency meaning (a writing implement) and a low-frequency meaning (enclosure for animals). In simple word association tasks (in the absence of any relevant context) participants are biased to retrieve the word’s more frequent meaning (e.g., Twilley, Dixon, Taylor, & Clark, 1994). Numerous studies have demonstrated the inf...

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...niversity College London online recruiting system and were paid for their participation. One participant was excluded due to poor performance on the vocabulary test. Twenty-nine participants (9 male; mean age = 22.8 years, SD = 9.3) were allocated to the unprimed (baseline) condition; and 30 participants (10 male; mean age = 24.2 years, SD = 7.7) took part in the primed condition.Materials The experimental materials for the priming phase consisted of 59 spoken sentences taken from the stimuli used in a previous fMRI study (Rodd, Davis, & Johnsrude, 2005) and a study of dual task interference (Rodd, Johnsrude, & Davis, 2010). The sentences (mean length = 9.3 words) were spoken by a British English female speaker and each contained two ambiguous words that were disambiguated within the sentence (e.g., ‘‘the steak was rare just as the customer has requested’’; see Appendix A for full list of sentences). Where possible the subordinate meaning of the ambiguous words was used in order to maximise the potential for increasing participants’ preferences for these meanings. However, detailed information about the dominance of these meanings for this population of participants was not available. A conventional measure of ...

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...ook part in each version. Materials The sentences used in the priming phases of the experiment consisted of 54 newly developed pairs of wordmeaning and semantic prime sentences (mean length = 11.9 words). The word-meaning primes each contained an ambiguous word that was disambiguated towards its subordinate meaning (e.g., ‘‘The man accepted the post in the accountancy firm’’; see Appendix B for the sentences). The ambiguous words were either non-homographic homophones (e.g., ‘‘prophet/profit’’) or homonyms (e.g., ‘‘deck’’). The subordinate meaning was selected on the basis of dominance norms (Gawlick-Grendell & Woltz, 1994; Nelson, McEvoy, Walling, & Wheeler, 1980; Sereno, Pacht, & Rayner, 1992; Twilley et al., 1994). The corresponding semantic prime sentences were identical except that the ambiguous word was replaced with a low-ambiguity word with essentially the same meaning in that context (e.g., ‘‘The man accepted the job in the accountancy firm’’). In order to create the six versions of the experiment (see ‘‘Design and procedure’’), the 54 pairs of sentences were divided into six sets of nine sentences. Each version of the experiment contained one of these sets in each of the six conditions, counterbalance...

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...e. A second set of relevant studies use a lexical decision task to explore the effect of repeated presentation. A number of studies have shown that for word pairs that include ambiguous words (e.g., ‘‘bank-money’’), participants were faster to respond to the second word in the pair when they had previously encountered a word pair that used the same meaning of the ambiguous word compared to trials using a different meaning (e.g., responses were faster following ‘‘bank-save’’ than following ‘‘bank-stream’’). To date, such studies have shown effects that persist across 12 intervening word pairs (Simpson & Kellas, 1989; Simpson & Kang, 1994; Copland, 2006). Similarly, Masson and Freedman (1990) found a robust repetition priming effect for second presentations of ambiguous words preceded by a disambiguating word, only when both presentations used the same meaning (e.g., ‘‘piano-organ’’ primed responses to ‘‘music-organ’’ but not ‘‘transplant-organ’’). The same effect was observed when, at test, ambiguous words were used as the primes and not as the targets: responses were faster for ‘same-meaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘haystraw’’ primed ‘‘straw-barn’’) compared with ‘differentmeaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘hay-straw’’ fol...

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...cant increase in the proportion of consistent responses produced after 3 min (40%) but no increase compared to baseline preferences after 20 min. Critically, at the 20 min delay there was a significant difference between the semantic priming condition and the word-meaning priming condition (even when the ‘repeated words’ had been removed). This pattern of results is consistent with the prevailing view in the literature that semantic priming is a relatively short-lived phenomenon and suggests that current theories of semantic priming (e.g., spreading activation models, compound cue models; see Jones (2010) for a recent review) are unlikely to provide an appropriate framework in which to explain the word-meaning priming effect, which remains robust after a delay of 20 min. This finding that word-meaning priming is contingent on the repeated presentation of the same ambiguous word in both the prime sentence and as a target word suggests that this word-meaning priming paradigm is more closely allied to repetition priming effects, which are known to be long lasting (e.g. lasting a year in studies of picture naming; Cave, 1997). Interestingly, studies using pictures indicate that long-term repetitio...

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...urse of lexical consolidation, which suggests that new information is only consolidated into the lexicon over a longer time-scale than in the current experiment, and that sleep may play a critical role in this process (see Davis and Gaskell (2010) for review). The evidence used to support this view of lexical consolidation comes primarily from studies in which participants are required to learn the phonological forms of lexical items that are entirely new to them. However, we have recently shown that competition from recently learned meanings similarly involves an extended period of learning (Rodd et al., 2012). This contrasts with the short-term re-tuning of previously established lexical representations explored here. It will be for future studies to determine whether or not short-term and longer-term retuning involves the same learning process. Future studies are also needed to determine whether this form of learning occurs whenever an ambiguous word is encountered within a sentence context, or whether it only occurs under more specific circumstances. One possibility is that the word-meaning priming effect is specifically triggered whenever an ambiguous word is initially misunderstood such that t...

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... 2, word association performance. Proportion of consistent responses for the different priming conditions. These scores reflect the proportion of responses that were consistent with the meaning used in the prime sentence. Error bars show standard errors adjusted to remove betweensubjects variance. 4 The conditio predicto 6 J.M. Rodd et al. / Journal of Memory and Language xxx (2012) xxx–xxx Please guagein the prime sentence,4 with larger priming effects being observed when the sentence meaning was strongly subordinate (ß = .82, p < .01). The effects of log-transformed CELEX frequency (Celex; Baayen, Piepenbrock, & Gulikers, 1995) and salience (see ‘‘Materials’’ section) were both non-significant (ß = .08, p = .17; ß = .11, p = .7). Finally, we did not find any relationship between the priming group’s consistency scores and either their vocabulary (r = .15, p = .4) or their digit span (r = .09, p = .7). Thus, within this sample, participants’ ability to learn from previous exposure to an ambiguous word was not significantly related to vocabulary size or short-term memory capacity as measured by digit span. Repeated word analyses In order to examine the extent to which this observed priming effect may have reflected ...

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...cal decision task to explore the effect of repeated presentation. A number of studies have shown that for word pairs that include ambiguous words (e.g., ‘‘bank-money’’), participants were faster to respond to the second word in the pair when they had previously encountered a word pair that used the same meaning of the ambiguous word compared to trials using a different meaning (e.g., responses were faster following ‘‘bank-save’’ than following ‘‘bank-stream’’). To date, such studies have shown effects that persist across 12 intervening word pairs (Simpson & Kellas, 1989; Simpson & Kang, 1994; Copland, 2006). Similarly, Masson and Freedman (1990) found a robust repetition priming effect for second presentations of ambiguous words preceded by a disambiguating word, only when both presentations used the same meaning (e.g., ‘‘piano-organ’’ primed responses to ‘‘music-organ’’ but not ‘‘transplant-organ’’). The same effect was observed when, at test, ambiguous words were used as the primes and not as the targets: responses were faster for ‘same-meaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘haystraw’’ primed ‘‘straw-barn’’) compared with ‘differentmeaning’ pairs (e.g., ‘‘hay-straw’’ followed by ‘‘strawdrink’’). In all these...

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...interactions between lexical and phonemic processing during online processing remain controversial (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000; McClelland, Mirman, & Holt, 2006), all are agreed that long-term learning can only be plausibly explained by a form of top-down, lexically-driven perceptual retuning (see Davis, Johnsrude, HervaisAdelman, Taylor, and McGettigan (2005) and McQueen, Norris, and Cutler (2006) for further discussion and related evidence). We note that this parallel between lexical/ semantic and phonemic ambiguity resolution is consistent with arguments made by Mirman and colleagues (Mirman, 2008; Mirman, McClelland, & Holt, 2006). There is also a useful parallel to be drawn between these results and the finding reported by Monsell and Hirsh (1998) that response times increase for a monosyllabic word (e.g., ‘‘bran’’) when it is preceded by a word that shares its onset and vowel (e.g., ‘‘brag’’). This effect was seen with lags of more than 5 min between prime and probe and was also found for similar pairs of polysyllabic words that share their first syllable (e.g., ‘‘beacon-beaker’’). This ‘competitive priming’ effect is only seen when both the prime and targets are real words. The aut...

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..., ‘‘religion’’, ‘‘Jesus’’, ‘‘Moses’’, ‘‘disciple’’, ‘‘messiah’’, ‘‘preach’’). A further piece of evidence that is contra to the predictions of an episodic memory account is that Experiment 2 showed that the word-meaning priming effect is equally robust under conditions in which there is a clear change in speaker between the priming and test phases. This again suggests that the effect is not modulated by a factor (voice congruency) that is known to modulate episodic memory tests such as recognition memory for spoken words (e.g., Luce & Lyons, 1998), but not lexical priming (Luce & Lyons, 1998; Orfanidou, Davis, Ford, & Marslen-Wilson, 2011). Taken together, these arguments suggest that the wordmeaning priming effect is unlikely to be entirely episodic in nature or to be based on recently learned associations between ambiguous words and the sentences in which they were recently heard. A second alternative explanation of the word-meaning priming effect is that it results from a form of purely semantic priming. Under this view, a listener would prefer a particular meaning of the ambiguous word because they had recently encountered congruent semantic information, regardless of whether they had recently encountered the ambiguous wor...