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Context and homograph meaning resolution.

P Dixon1, L C Twilley

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton. peter.dixon@ualberta.ca

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology = Revue Canadienne De Psychologie Experimentale
|January 26, 2000
PubMed
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This study presents a simple activation model for word recognition, explaining how context and word frequency help resolve ambiguous word meanings (homographs). The model accurately predicts how people choose the correct meaning based on sentence cues.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Psycholinguistics

Background:

  • Lexical ambiguity, particularly with homographs, poses a challenge for word recognition.
  • Understanding how context influences meaning selection is crucial for models of language processing.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose and validate an activation-based model for resolving homograph meaning in context.
  • To investigate the interplay of orthographic information, contextual cues, and meaning frequency in lexical ambiguity resolution.

Main Methods:

  • Participants performed a relatedness judgment task on sentences containing homographs.
  • An activation-based computational model was developed, assuming additive combination of orthographic and contextual information.
  • Model predictions were compared against behavioral data, analyzing effects of meaning frequency, delay, and context.

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Main Results:

  • Relatedness decisions were systematically influenced by homograph meaning frequency, presentation delay, and sentence context.
  • The proposed model accurately accounted for these behavioral effects and their interactions.
  • Model parameters reflected the additive contribution of orthographic and contextual inputs to meaning activation.

Conclusions:

  • The core mechanism of lexical ambiguity resolution may be a straightforward additive process.
  • Activation-based models provide a viable framework for explaining how contextual information guides word meaning selection.
  • This research simplifies our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying homograph interpretation.