TY  - JOUR
A1  - Lopukhina, Anastasiya
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - Lopukhin, Konstantin
A1  - Dragoy, Olga V.
T1  - The Mental Representation of Polysemy across Word Classes
JF  - Frontiers in psychology
N2  - Experimental studies on polysemy have come to contradictory conclusions on whether words with multiple senses are stored as separate or shared mental representations. The present study examined the semantic relatedness and semantic similarity of literal and non-literal (metonymic and metaphorical) senses of three word classes: nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Two methods were used: a psycholinguistic experiment and a distributional analysis of corpus data. In the experiment, participants were presented with 6-12 short phrases containing a polysemous word in literal, metonymic, or metaphorical senses and were asked to classify them so that phrases with the same perceived sense were grouped together. To investigate the impact of professional background on their decisions, participants were controlled for linguistic vs. non-linguistic education. For nouns and verbs, all participants preferred to group together phrases with literal and metonymic senses, but not any other pairs of senses. For adjectives, two pairs of senses were often grouped together: literal with metonymic, and metonymic with metaphorical. Participants with a linguistic background were more accurate than participants with non-linguistic backgrounds, although both groups shared principal patterns of sense classification. For the distributional analysis of corpus data, we used a semantic vector approach to quantify the similarity of phrases with literal, metonymic, and metaphorical senses in the corpora. We found that phrases with literal and metonymic senses had the highest degree of similarity for the three word classes, and that metonymic and metaphorical senses of adjectives had the highest degree of similarity among all word classes. These findings are in line with the experimental results. Overall, the results suggest that the mental representation of a polysemous word depends on its word class. In nouns and verbs, literal and metonymic senses are stored together, while metaphorical senses are stored separately; in adjectives, metonymic senses significantly overlap with both literal and metaphorical senses.
KW  - polysemy
KW  - lexical representation
KW  - metaphor
KW  - metonymy
KW  - semantic vectors
KW  - word classes
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00192
SN  - 1664-1078
VL  - 9
PB  - Frontiers Research Foundation
CY  - Lausanne
ER  - 
TY  - JOUR
A1  - Malyutina, Svetlana
A1  - Laurinavichyute, Anna
A1  - Terekhina, Maria
A1  - Lapin, Yevgeniy
T1  - No evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing in sentence processing
JF  - Psychology and aging
N2  - Older adults demonstrate a slower speed of linguistic processing, including sentence processing. In nonlinguistic cognitive domains such as memory, research suggests that age-related slowing of processing speed may be a strategy adopted in order to avoid potential error and/or to spare “cognitive resources.” So far, very few studies have tested whether older adults’ slower processing speed in the linguistic domain has a strategic nature as well. To fill this gap, we tested whether older adults can maintain language processing accuracy when a faster processing speed is enforced externally. Specifically, we compared sentence comprehension accuracy in younger and older adults when sentences were presented at the participant’s median self-paced reading speed versus twice as fast. We hypothesized that an external speed increase will cause a smaller accuracy decline in older than younger adults because older adults tend to adopt self-paced processing speeds “further away” from their performance limits. The hypothesis was not confirmed: The decline in accuracy due to faster presentation did not differ by age group. Thus, we found no evidence for strategic nature of age-related slowing of sentence processing. On the basis of our experimental design, we suggest that the age-related slowing of sentence processing is caused not only by motor slowdown, but also by a slowdown in cognitive processing
KW  - aging
KW  - processing speed
KW  - sentence comprehension
KW  - language and aging
KW  - processing strategies
Y1  - 2018
U6  - https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000302
SN  - 0882-7974
SN  - 1939-1498
VL  - 33
IS  - 7
SP  - 1045
EP  - 1059
PB  - American Psychological Association
CY  - Washington
ER  -