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Available under license: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Final published version
Licence: CC BY: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming
T2 - A corpus-based approach
AU - Chang, Ya-Ning
AU - Lee, Chia-Ying
N1 - © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
PY - 2018/12
Y1 - 2018/12
N2 - Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and demonstrated ambiguity advantage in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of the objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed contextual diversity (Adelman et al. 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman et al. 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the present semantic space. We then derived a novel ambiguity measure, namely semantic variability, by computing distance properties of the distinct clusters grouped by the contexts that contained a given word. We demonstrated that semantic variability was superior to semantic diversity in accounting for the variance in the naming RTs, suggesting that considering the substructure of various contexts associated with a given word can provide a relatively fine scale of ambiguity information for a word. All the context and ambiguity measures for 2,418 Chinese single-character words are provided as supplementary materials.
AB - Words are considered semantically ambiguous if they have more than one meaning and can be used in multiple contexts. A number of recent studies have provided objective ambiguity measures by using a corpus-based approach and demonstrated ambiguity advantage in both naming and lexical decision tasks. Although the predictive power of the objective ambiguity measures has been examined in several alphabetic language systems, the effects in logographic languages remain unclear. Moreover, most ambiguity measures do not explicitly address how various contexts associated with a given word relate to each other. To explore these issues, we computed contextual diversity (Adelman et al. 2006) and semantic ambiguity (Hoffman et al. 2013) of traditional Chinese single-character words based on the Academia Sinica Balanced Corpus, where contextual diversity was used to evaluate the present semantic space. We then derived a novel ambiguity measure, namely semantic variability, by computing distance properties of the distinct clusters grouped by the contexts that contained a given word. We demonstrated that semantic variability was superior to semantic diversity in accounting for the variance in the naming RTs, suggesting that considering the substructure of various contexts associated with a given word can provide a relatively fine scale of ambiguity information for a word. All the context and ambiguity measures for 2,418 Chinese single-character words are provided as supplementary materials.
KW - Semantic ambiguity
KW - Chinese character naming
KW - Latent semantic analysis
KW - Contextual diversity
KW - Semantic diversity
U2 - 10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4
DO - 10.3758/s13428-017-0993-4
M3 - Journal article
VL - 50
SP - 2292
EP - 2304
JO - Behavior Research Methods
JF - Behavior Research Methods
SN - 1554-351X
IS - 6
ER -