Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In many recent models of word recognition, words compete to activate distributed semantic representations. Reports of faster visual lexical decisions for ambiguous words compared with unambiguous words are problematic for such models; why does increased semantic competition between different meanings not slow the recognition of ambiguous words? This study challenges these findings by showing that visual lexical decisions to ambiguous words whose meanings were judged to be unrelated were slower than either unambiguous words or ambiguous words whose meanings were judged to be related. We suggest that previous reports of an ambiguity advantage are due to the use of ambiguous words with highly related meanings.