Global context effects on processing lexically ambiguous words: evidence from eye fixations

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Lexical ambiguity resolution is influenced by contextual information.
• Biased ambiguous words have a dominant and a subordinate meaning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the impact of global and local context on resolving biased ambiguous words.
• To determine the timing and interaction of global and local contextual effects.

Main Methods:

• Eye movements of readers were monitored while reading paragraphs with manipulated global and local context.
• Contextual information varied in its consistency with the subordinate meaning of biased ambiguous target words.

Main Results:

• A subordinate bias effect was observed, where readers looked longer at ambiguous words when context supported the subordinate meaning.
• The magnitude of this effect was consistent regardless of whether global context, local context, or both were subordinate-biased.
• Global context showed an immediate effect when no local information was present, no additional effect when consistent with local context, and a delayed effect when inconsistent.

Conclusions:

• Global context plays a crucial role in initial lexical ambiguity resolution.
• The interplay between global and local context influences the temporal dynamics of meaning access.