Ambiguity advantage effect by the number of objective meanings or subjective meanings?

Abstract

Three experiments were performed to examine whether the ambiguity advantage effect is determined by the number of meanings of Korean dictionary or of meanings consciously retrieved and to see if that effect is task-specific. In experiment 1 and 2, the lexical decision task was used, and in experiment 3, the word naming task was employed. The results of the experiment 1 and 2 showed the ambiguity advantage effect is mostly modulated by the number of meanings reported consciously by subjects not by the count of dictionary meanings. And also this effect was found in the word naming task, implicating that this effect is caused by the lexical stages common to two different tasks of lexical decision and naming.