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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Jun 12, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
06:48

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment

Published on: June 25, 2019

Automatic quantification of lexical ambiguity using large-scale word association data.

Ignacio Iglesias1, Blair C Armstrong2,3, Julieta Laurino4

  • 1Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Behavior Research Methods
|June 10, 2026
PubMed
Summary

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The "Small World of Words" free association norms for Rioplatense Spanish.

Behavior research methods·2023

This study introduces a new automated method to measure lexical ambiguity using word association data. The framework quantifies meaning frequency and relatedness, predicting cognitive performance and revealing cross-linguistic differences in ambiguity.

Area of Science:

  • Psycholinguistics
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Cognitive Science

Background:

  • Lexical ambiguity, a core language feature, is challenging to measure accurately.
  • Existing methods (dictionary-based, subjective ratings) fail to capture graded meanings and are difficult to scale.
  • Accurate ambiguity metrics are crucial for understanding semantic processing and cognitive performance.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To develop a novel, automated framework for quantifying lexical ambiguity.
  • To derive graded measures of meaning frequency and relatedness from word association data.
  • To validate the framework by comparing it to existing norms and predicting cognitive performance.

Main Methods:

  • Utilized word association data from the Small World of Words (SWOW) project.
Keywords:
Community detectionFree associationLexical ambiguityMeaning similarity/meaning relatednessRioplatense SpanishSmall World of Words (SWOW)

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: Jun 12, 2026

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment
06:48

Lexical Decision Task for Studying Written Word Recognition in Adults with and without Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment

Published on: June 25, 2019

  • Applied community detection algorithms to association graphs to identify semantic communities.
  • Derived graded metrics of meaning frequency and relatedness for each word.

    • Main Results:

    • The automated framework successfully quantified lexical ambiguity and its semantic structure.
    • New metrics predicted lexical decision performance in both English and Spanish.
    • Spanish was found to be less ambiguous than English, suggesting typological influences.

    Conclusions:

    • The validated framework offers a scalable, automated, and language-independent approach to measuring lexical ambiguity.
    • Provides novel insights for computational and psycholinguistic models of semantic processing.
    • The study offers open-access code and ambiguity measures for researchers.