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<Paper uid="W06-2506">
  <Title>Characterizing Response Types and Revealing Noun Ambiguity in German Association Norms</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="47" end_page="47" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper we evaluated differences in the types and strengths of semantic associations elicited under twoconditions of presentation, 'picture+word' and 'word only'. Consistent with prior psycholinguistic research, we observed associations to different meanings of a word in both conditions, supporting the idea that multiple meanings of homonymsareactiveduringbothpictureandword processing. However, our analyses of response types also showed that responses to pictures were less diverse and idiosyncratic than responses to words, suggesting that the degree to which alternative meanings are active in the two presentation modes mayindeed be different. One further implication of the analyses is that semantic associations (and especially association strengths) from word-based norming studies do not necessarily generalize for the purpose of experiments using depicted materials. This insight should have an impact on psycholinguistic studies when selecting depicted vs. written stimuli.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Our predictions for the types of differences we expected were based on intuitive grounds. One might therefore question the value of the analyses presented in Section 4. It is interesting to note, however, that some of the predictions were in fact not born out. As the cluster analysis presented in Section 5 required differences between the two stimulus modes, it was critical that a proper evaluation of those differences be conducted, even if some of them seem trivially true.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The cluster analysis demonstrated that we can capitalize on the semantic associations and both identify and discriminate the various senses of the target nouns. Indeed, the clusters not only revealed sense differences of target nouns with respecttotheirpresentationmodes, butalsodetected noun senses which had not been identified by the authors initially. This indicates that this method not only can discriminate between senses but it can also detect ambiguity. The cluster analysis allowed us to apply automatic methods of identifyingwhich meaning ofawordaparticularassociate refers to, which would otherwise be a time consuming and error-prone manual activity.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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