The neglected role of lexical ambiguity in embodied cognition models

We focus on lexical ambiguity to convene two frameworks – embodied cognition and models of representation of ambiguous words. By harnessing the well-established findings from the two approaches, we achieve novel insights of interest for both fields. In the first of the four studies, we collected sensorimotor ratings for separate meanings/senses of ambiguous words and compared homonyms (words with multiple unrelated meanings; e.g. bank) and polysemes (words with multiple related senses; e.g. paper) for the similarity of the obtained profiles on the 12 scales to demonstrate that the linguistic categorization was mirrored in the sensorimotor experience with the referents. We then collected subjective ratings of semantic similarities between pairs of meanings/senses within a word and investigated their relation with the similarity of the sensorimotor profiles to corroborate that the sensorimotor-based similarity was semantic in nature. Finally, we tested if the obtained measures were predictive of processing. Although the visual lexical decision task failed to provoke deep enough processing, our novel paradigm of continuous priming in the experience verification task revealed that preactivation of the sensory modality that is shared between two senses of a polysemous word enhanced facilitation by the related prime. Our results speak in favour of sensorimotor information as a component of partially overlapping representations of polysemous senses and advise future norming studies to take into account lexical ambiguity.