Carving up word meaning: Portioning and grinding

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the processing of mass nouns used as count nouns and count nouns used as mass nouns. Following Copestake and Briscoe (1995), the basic or underived sense of a word was treated as the input to a derivational rule (“grinding” or “portioning”) which produced the derived sense as output. It was hypothesized that in the absence of biasing evidence readers would immediately assign the underived sense, resulting in difficulty if this sense proved to be incorrect. In Experiment 1, which examined the portioning of mass nouns (as in She wanted beers), a small and early penalty was observed on the target noun for mass nouns appearing in a count noun context. In Experiment 2, in addition to an early (first-pass regression) effect, a much later appearing penalty was observed for count nouns appearing in a mass noun context (as in She wanted banana). The results are taken to support the hypothesis of immediate commitment to the underived sense of polysemous words when the two senses are related by a derivational rule and they are contrasted with the processing profile observed for other types of polysemous words.