The time course of sense creation

Abstract

In everyday conversation listeners often need to create new meanings for old words. For example, listeners must create the meaning "uniformed police officers" for the word uniforms in the utterance, "There are 20,000 uniforms in this city." For such meanings, the process of sense creation must operate to supplement ordinary sense selection. The present experiments contrast two models of the time course of these processes. The error recovery model suggests that sense creation operates only after sense selection fails. The concurrent processing model suggests that sense selection and sense creation operate simultaneously. Preempting innovations--novel terms identical in form to conventional terms, such as uniforms--provide the means to contrast the models. The experiments demonstrate that the concurrent processing model gives a more accurate description of comprehension.