Similarity of sensorimotor experience as a measure of the relatedness among the meanings

Abstract

PDP models of lexical ambiguity (Rodd, 2018) see the word meaning as distributed in the pattern of activation of basic units, the patterns being more similar in the case of related senses of the polysemous words (paper), than in the case of unrelated meanings of homonyms (bank). In parallel, embodied cognition models (Barsalou, 1999) see prior sensorimotor (SM) experience as the basis of representation. We combined the two model groups to test the hypothesis that SM information could serve as basic units. Participants rated the possibility of SM experience for individual senses/meanings of ambiguous words and the semantic similarity of sense/meaning pairs. We observed both higher semantic similarity ratings and higher similarity of SM experience ratings in the case of polysemous words. However, the estimated similarity of SM ratings was not predictive of visual lexical decision task latencies, suggesting the need for more refined measures. Our results are the first to show that semantic similarity of senses/meanings of ambiguous words is reflected in the similarity of SM experience with objects denoted by them, suggesting that traces of SM experiences could serve as the basic units hypothesised by PDP models.