Learning new meanings for old words: effects of semantic relatedness

Changes to our everyday activities mean that adult language users need to learn new meanings for previously unambiguous words. For example, we need to learn that a tweet is not only the sound a bird makes, but also a short message on a social networking site. In these experiments, adult participants learned new fictional meanings for words with a single dominant meaning (e.g., ant) by reading paragraphs that described these novel meanings. Explicit recall of these meanings was significantly better when there was a strong semantic relationship between the novel meaning and the existing meaning. This relatedness effect emerged after relatively brief exposure to the meanings (Experiment 1), but it persisted when training was extended across 7 days (Experiment 2) and when semantically demanding tasks were used during this extended training (Experiment 3). A lexical decision task was used to assess the impact of learning on online recognition. In Experiment 3, participants responded more quickly to words whose new meaning was semantically related than to those with an unrelated meaning. This result is consistent with earlier studies showing an effect of meaning relatedness on lexical decision, and it indicates that these newly acquired meanings become integrated with participants' preexisting knowledge about the meanings of words.