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Sentential and discourse topic effects on lexical ambiguity processing: an eye movement examination
1Department of Psychology and Education, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts 01075, USA. kbinder@mtholyoke.edu
Memory & Cognition
|September 6, 2003
Summary
This study investigated how context influences understanding ambiguous words. Findings suggest neither the less common nor the common meaning of ambiguous words is selectively accessed, even with strong contextual cues.
Area of Science:
- Psycholinguistics
- Cognitive Psychology
- Computational Linguistics
Background:
- Models of lexical ambiguity resolution propose context plays a role, but 'context' is poorly defined.
- Two forms of contextual constraint were isolated to test access models.
Purpose of the Study:
- To differentiate between selective and reordered access models of ambiguity processing.
- To examine the role of local context and discourse topic in accessing word meanings.
Main Methods:
- Eye movements were monitored as participants read passages with ambiguous words.
- Contextual constraints (sentence and discourse topic) were manipulated to bias word meaning access.
Main Results:
- Subordinate meanings were not selectively accessed, even with biased sentence and discourse context.
- Dominant meanings were also not selectively accessed under biased contextual conditions.
Conclusions:
- Current findings challenge models assuming selective access for either meaning of ambiguous words.
- Contextual cues, while present, did not lead to exclusive access of a single word meaning.