36.3454, FYI: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere seminar: Marina Ortega-Andrés, ​"When This Chef Says Pot: The Importance of the Speaker's Identity in Understanding Ambiguous Words"

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-3454. Wed Nov 12 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.3454, FYI: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere seminar: Marina Ortega-Andrés, ​"When This Chef Says Pot: The Importance of the Speaker's Identity in Understanding Ambiguous Words"

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Date: 12-Nov-2025
From: Dan Zeman [danczeman at gmail.com]
Subject: Polysemy in the Evaluative Sphere seminar: Marina Ortega-Andrés, ​"When This Chef Says Pot: The Importance of the Speaker's Identity in Understanding Ambiguous Words"


Polysemy in the Evalutive Sphere is a seminar pertaining to the
project Slurs and the Lexicon: A Rich-Lexicon Approach to Slurs and
Other Evaluative Expressions - LEXISLUR
(https://danzeman.weebly.com/lexislur.html) featuring monthly talks by
specialists in polysemy. We cordially invite you to the second talk of
the seminar series, to be given by Marina Ortega-Andrés (University of
the Basque Country) and entitled ​"When this chef says pot: The
importance of the speaker's identity in understanding ambiguous words"
(see the abstract below). The event takes place online on Friday,
NOVEMBER 21, 11.00-12.30 Western European Time (WET). Please write to
danczeman at gmail.com for the Zoom link.
All welcome!
ASBTRACT:
In this talk I will explore how listeners interpret ambiguous words
based on their previous experience with specific speakers. A widely
accepted assumption in psychology and linguistics is that, over the
course of life, speakers accumulate vast statistical information about
language use—including not only the contexts in which certain words
are typically used but also the relative frequency of their meanings.
This information should guide (alongside other factors) our
interpretations: in absence of more contextual information, we tend to
assign words their most frequent or dominant meaning. However, recent
studies have shown that these preferences are not fixed. A single
exposure to a word in a disambiguated context can alter its later
interpretation, at least temporarily. For example, after hearing bark
referring to tree bark, listeners tend to associate the word with that
meaning—even though it is less frequent—rather than its more dominant
meaning ("dog’s bark"). This phenomenon, known as word meaning
priming, can last for hours or even days, suggesting that previous
experience can alter the listener’s probabilistic estimates about what
a word probably means. In a series of experimental studies, we
investigated whether this effect also depends on the identity of the
speaker. Participants heard one speaker (e.g., a chef) consistently
using ambiguous words (like pot) to refer to things related to cooking
(cooking pot) in a thematically related context (cooking dinner for a
birthday party). After that, participants heard a speaker (who could
be the same or a different speaker) asking "which picture goes best
with the word pot?" Participants had to pick the image that answered
the question. We found that when the speaker was the same in both
tasks, participants picked the image that was related to the primed
sense (i.e. the cooking pot) more often than when there was no
previous story. However, when the speaker was different in each task,
the probability of selecting the primed meaning significantly
decreased, even when both speakers were chefs. This result suggests
that listeners sometimes retain previous uses of a word by one speaker
for future encounters with the same speaker. However, if a different
speaker—even another chef—uses the same word, listeners tend to access
the more frequent meaning of the word (“plant pot”) again. We
interpret this result as meaning that experience with specific
individuals talking about a given topic shapes semantic expectations
in future interactions with that same person.These expectations do not
transfer to other speakers and even when the two speakers belong to
the same group (such as being a chef) is not enough to generalize the
interpretation from one speaker to another. Thus, access to meaning
may be partly shaped by local, personal, and dynamic experiences with
individual speakers. This invites us to consider that the mental
lexicon is flexible and that semantic access may partially be speaker
specific.

Linguistic Field(s): Philosophy of Language
                     Semantics




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