Lexical ambiguity is pervasive among Chinese characters as many of them are polysemantic, with one orthographic form carrying unrelated meanings, related meanings, or sometimes both unrelated and related meanings. A large-scale database with ambiguity measures for simplified Chinese characters has yet to be developed, which could greatly benefit psycholinguistic research on the Chinese language or cross-language comparisons. This article reports two sets of ratings by native speakers, the perceived number of meanings (pNoM) for 4,363 characters and the perceived relatedness of meanings (pRoM) for a subset of 1,053 characters. These rating-based ambiguity measures capture the representational nuance about a character’s meanings stored in average native speakers’ mental lexicon, which tends to be obscured by dictionary- and corpus-based ambiguity measures. Consequently, they each account for a reliable portion of variance in the efficiency of character processing, above and beyond the effects of character frequency, age of acquisition, and other types of ambiguity measures. Theoretical and empirical implications with regard to the plurality and the relatedness of character meanings, the two focal aspects of debate on lexical ambiguity, are discussed.
ArmstrongB. C.PlautD. C. (2016). Disparate semantic ambiguity effects from semantic processing dynamics rather than qualitative task differences. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31(7), 940–966.
2.
AzumaT. (1996). Familiarity and relatedness of word meanings: Ratings for 110 homographs. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 28(1), 109–124.
3.
BalotaD. A.ChumbleyJ. I. (1984). Are lexical decision a good measure of lexical access? The role of word frequency in the neglected decision stage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 10, 340–375.
4.
BerettaA.FiorentinoR.PoeppelD. (2005). The effects of homonymy and polysemy on lexical access: An MEG study. Cognitive Brain Research, 24(1), 57–65.
5.
BorowskyR.MassonM. E. J. (1996). Semantic ambiguity effects in word identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 22(1), 63–85.
6.
BrittonB. K. (1978). Lexical ambiguity of words used in English text. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 10, 1–7.
7.
BrysbaertM.WarrinerA. B.KupermanV. (2014). Concreteness ratings for 40 thousand generally known English word lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 46, 904–911.
8.
CaiQ.BrysbaertM. (2010). SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese word and character frequencies based on film subtitles. PLOS ONE, 5(6), Article e10729.
9.
CaiZ. G.HuangS.XuZ.ZhaoN. (2022). Objective ages of acquisition for 3300+ simplified Chinese characters. Behavior Research Methods, 54, 311–323.
10.
ChangY. N.HsuC. H.TsaiJ. L.ChenC. L.LeeC. Y. (2016). A psycholinguistic database for traditional Chinese character naming. Behavior Research Methods, 48(1), 112–122.
11.
ChangY. N.LeeC. Y. (2018). Semantic ambiguity effects on traditional Chinese character naming: A corpus-based approach. Behavior Research Methods, 50(6), 2292–2304.
12.
ClemmonsK. (2008). The problem of polysemy in the first thousand words of the general service list: A corpus study of secondary chemistry texts. Dissertations & Theses Gradworks. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/etd/3527/
13.
DeLongK. A.TrottS.KutasM. (2022). Offline dominance and zeugmatic similarity normings of variably ambiguous words assessed against a neural language model (BERT). Behavior Research Methods. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-022-01869-6
14.
FerraroF. R.KellasG. (1990). Normative data for number of word meanings. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments & Computers, 22(6), 491–498.
15.
FirthJ. R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930–1955. In FirthJ. R. (Ed.), Studies in linguistic analysis (pp. 1–32). Blackwell.
16.
FragaI.PadrónI.PereaM.ComesañaM. (2017). I saw this somewhere else: The Spanish Ambiguous Words (SAW) database. Lingua, 185, 1–10.
17.
Gawlick-GrendellL. A.WoltzD. J. (1994). Meaning dominance norms for 120 homographs. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers, 26(1), 5–25.
18.
GernsbacherM. A. (1984). Resolving 20 years of inconsistent interactions between lexical familiarity and orthography, concreteness and polysemy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 113, 256–281.
19.
GilhoolyK. J.LogieR. H. (1980). Age-of-acquisition, imagery, concreteness, familiarity, and ambiguity measures for 1,944 words. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 12(4), 395–427.
20.
HaroJ.FerréP. (2018). Semantic Ambiguity: Do multiple meanings inhibit or facilitate word recognition?Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 47(3), 679–698.
21.
HarrisZ. (1954). Distributional hypothesis. Word, 10(23), 146–162.
22.
HinoY.LupkerS. J. (1996). Effects of polysemy in lexical decision and naming: An alternative to lexical access accounts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 22(6), 1331–1356.
23.
HinoY.LupkerS. J.PexmanP. M. (2002). Ambiguity and synonymy effects in lexical decision, naming, and semantic categorization tasks: Interactions between orthography, phonology, and semantics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 28(4), 686–713.
24.
HinoY.PexmanP. M.LupkerS. J. (2006). Ambiguity and relatedness effects in semantic tasks: Are they due to semantic coding?Journal of Memory and Language, 55(2), 247–273.
25.
HinoY.KusunoseY.LupkerS. J. (2010). The relatedness-of-meaning effect for ambiguous words in lexical-decision tasks: When does relatedness matter?Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(3), 180–196.
26.
HoffmanP.Lambon RalphM. A.RogersT. T. (2013). Semantic diversity: A measure of semantic ambiguity based on variability in the contextual usage of words. Behavior Research Methods, 45(3), 718–730.
27.
HsuC. H.LeeC. Y.MarantzA. (2011). Effects of visual complexity and sublexical information in the occipitotemporal cortex in the reading of Chinese phonograms: A single-trial analysis with MEG. Brain and Language, 117(1), 1–11.
28.
HuangH. W.LeeC. Y.TsaiJ. L.TzengO. J. L. (2011). Sublexical ambiguity effect in reading Chinese disyllabic compounds. Brain and Language, 117(2), 77–87.
29.
Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. (2011). Xīnhuá Dictionary (11th ed.). The Commercial Press.
30.
Institute of Linguistics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. (2016). Xiàndài Hànyǔ Cídiǎn [Modern Chinese Dictionary] (7th ed.). The Commercial Press.
31.
KauslerD. H.KollaschS. F. (1970). Word associations to homographs. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9(4), 444–449.
32.
KellasG.FerraroF. R.SimpsonG. B. (1988). Lexical ambiguity and the timecourse of attentional allocation in word recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 14(4), 601–609.
33.
KlepousniotouE.BaumS. R. (2007). Disambiguating the ambiguity advantage effect in word recognition: An advantage for polysemous but not homonymous words. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 20(1), 1–24.
34.
KlepousniotouE.TitoneD.RomeroC. (2008). Making sense of word senses: The comprehension of polysemy depends on sense overlap. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 34(6), 1534–1543.
35.
KupermanV.Stadthagen-GonzalezH.BrysbaertM. (2012). Age- of-acquisition ratings for 30,000 English words. Behavior Research Methods, 44(4), 978–990.
36.
Language and Teaching Institute of Beijing Linguistic College. (1986). Xiàndài Hànyǔ Pínlǜ Cídiǎn [Modern Chinese Frequency Dictionary]. Beijing Language Institute Press.
37.
LinC. J. C.AhrensK. (2005). How many meanings does a word have? Meaning estimation in Chinese and English. In MenittJ.WangW. S. Y. (Eds.), Language acquisition, change and emergence: Essays in evolutionary linguistics (pp. 437–464). Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press.
38.
LiuY.ShuH.LiP. (2007). Word naming and psycholinguistic norms. Behavioral Research Methods, 39(2), 192–198.
39.
LyonsJ. (1977). Semantics. Cambridge University Press.
40.
LyonsJ. (1981). Language and linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
41.
McClellandJ. L.RumelhartD. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1 An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88, 375–407.
42.
McEneryA.XiaoZ. (2004). The Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus for monolingual and contrastive language study. In LinoM. T.XavierM. F.FerreiraF.CostaR.SilvaR. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC (pp. 1175–1178). Lisbon, Portugal: European Language Resources Association.
43.
MillisM. L.ButtonS. B. (1989). The effect of polysemy on lexical decision time: Now you see it, now you don’t. Memory & Cognition, 17(2), 141–147.
44.
MorrisW. (1969). The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. Houghton Mifflin.
45.
NelsonD. L.McEvoyC. L.WallingJ. R.WheelerJ. W. (1980). The University of South Florida homograph norms. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 12(1), 16–37.
46.
ParksR.RayJ.BlandS. (1998). Wordsmyth English dictionary—Thesaurus. University of Chicago. http://www.wordsmyth.net/
47.
PengD. L.DengY.ChenB. G. (2003). The polysemy effect in Chinese one-character word identification. Acta Psycholologica Sinica, 35(5), 569–575.
48.
PexmanP. M.HinoY.LupkerS. J. (2004). Semantic ambiguity and the process of generating meaning from print. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 30(6), 1252–1270.
49.
Real Academia Española. (2001). Diccionario de la lengua española (22nd ed.).
50.
RoddJ.GaskellG.Marslen-WilsonW. (2002). Making sense of semantic ambiguity: Semantic competition in lexical access. Journal of Memory and Language, 46(2), 245–266.
51.
RoddJ. M.CaiZ. G.BettsH. N.HanbyB.HutchinsonC.AdlerA. (2016). The impact of recent and long-term experience on access to word meanings: Evidence from large-scale internet-based experiments. Journal of Memory and Language, 87, 16–37.
52.
RogersT. T.McClellandJ. L. (2004). Semantic cognition: A parallel distributed processing approach. MIT Press.
53.
SahlgrenM. (2008). The distributional hypothesis. Italian Journal of Disability Studies, 20, 33–53.
54.
Science Publishers. (1988). Dictionary of Chinese character information.
55.
SunY. S. (1995). Xiǎoyì xiàndài hànyǔ chángyòngzì zhōng de duōyīnduōyìzì [Brief discussion on polyphonic and polysemous characters among common characters in modern Chinese]. Jíníng Shīfàn Dàxué Xuébào [Journal of Jining Normal University], 2, 53–55.
56.
SzeW. P.Rickard LiowS. J.YapM. J. (2014). The Chinese Lexicon Project: A repository of lexical decision behavioral responses for 2,500 Chinese characters. Behavior Research Methods, 46(1), 263–273.
57.
TamminenJ.ClelandA. A.QuinlanP. T.GaskellM. G. (2006). Processing semantic ambiguity: Different loci for meanings and senses. In SunR.MiyakeN. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2222–2227). Vancouver, Canada: Cognitive Science Society.
58.
TsangY.HuangJ.LuiM.XueM.ChanY. F.WangS.ChenH. (2018). MELD-SCH : A megastudy of lexical decision in simplified Chinese. Behavioral Research Methods, 50, 1763–1777.
59.
TwilleyL. C.DixonP.TaylorD.ClarkK. (1994). University of Alberta norms of relative meaning frequency for 566 homographs. Memory & Cognition, 22(1), 111–126.
60.
WangL. (1957). Hànyǔ Shǐgǎo [Chinese Historical Manuscripts]. Zhonghua Book Company.
61.
WangR.HuangS.ZhouY.CaiZ. G. (2020). Chinese character handwriting: A large-scale behavioral study and a database. Behavior Research Methods, 52(1), 82–96.
62.
WarrinerA. B.KupermanV.BrysbaertM. (2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 45(4), 1191–1207.
63.
WestM. (1953). A general service list of English words. Longman.
64.
WollenK. A.CoxS. D.CoahranM. M.SheaD. S.KirbyR. F. (1980). Frequency of occurrence and concreteness ratings of homograph meanings. Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation, 12(1), 8–15.
65.
WuY.DuanR.ZhaoS.TsangY. K. (2020). Processing ambiguous morphemes in Chinese compound word recognition: behavioral and ERP evidence. Neuroscience, 446, 249–260.
66.
XieJ. F. (2011). Chinese dictionary of binding words. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press.
XuX.LiJ. (2020). Concreteness/abstractness ratings for two-character Chinese words in MELD-SCH. PLOS ONE, 15(6), Article e0232133.
69.
XuX.LiJ.ChenH. (2022). Valence and arousal ratings for 11,310 simplified Chinese words. Behavior Research Methods, 54, 26–41.
70.
XuX.LiJ.GuoS. (2021). Age of acquisition ratings for 19,716 simplified Chinese words. Behavior Research Methods, 53, 558–573.
71.
YeeL. T. S. (2017). Valence, arousal, familiarity, concreteness, and imageability ratings for 292 two-character Chinese nouns in Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong. PLOS ONE, 12(3), Article e0174569.
72.
ZhangZ. G. (1982). Xiàndài Hànyǔ [Modern Chinese]. People’s Education Press.
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
