Semantic ambiguity within and across languages: An integrative review

Abstract

Semantic ambiguity often occurs within a language (e.g., the word “organ” in English means both a body part and a musical instrument), but it can also cross a language boundary, such that a given word form is shared in two languages, but its meanings are different (e.g., the word “angel” means “sting” in Dutch). Bilingual individuals are therefore faced not only with ambiguity in each of their languages, but also with ambiguity across languages. The current review focuses on studies that explored such cross-language ambiguity and examines how the results from these studies can be integrated with what we have learned about within-language ambiguity resolution. In particular, this review examines how interactions of frequency and context manifest themselves in ambiguity that crosses a language boundary and call for the inclusion of language context as a contributing factor. An extension of the monolingual reordered access model (Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988) is outlined to discuss the interactions between these factors. Furthermore, the effects of the similarity between the two meanings, task differences, and individual differences are explored. This review highlights the need for studies that test within- and cross-language ambiguity in the same individuals before strong conclusions can be made about the nature of interactions between frequency, semantic context, and language context.

Keywords:

• Semantic ambiguity
• Interlingual homographs

Acknowledgments

We thank Charles A. Perfetti, Leida C. Tolentino, and Tessa Warren for their helpful comments on a version of this manuscript. N.T. and T.D. were funded by NSF-BCS-0745372 during the writing of this manuscript.

Notes

¹We assume here a shared meaning representation for words in the two languages, in accordance with most current bilingual models (for a review, see Kroll & Tokowicz, 2005), although the “financial institution” concept may be somewhat different in each language, such that subtleties may exist in the particular set of meaning features emphasized in each language (e.g., de Groot, 1992).