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Updated: Jun 17, 2026

Dissociation of the Confounding Influences of Expectancy and Integrative Difficulty Residing in Anomalous Sentences in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: May 9, 2019
The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context
Alexander Pollatsek1, Denis Drieghe, Linnaea Stockall
1Department of Psychology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts 01003, USA. pollatsek@psych.umass.edu
Abstract:
Many trimorphemic words are structurally and semantically ambiguous. For example, unlockable can either be un-lockable (cannot be locked) or unlock-able (can be unlocked). Which interpretation is preferred and whether the preceding sentence context affects the initial interpretation is not clear from prior research. The present experiment embedded ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence contexts, manipulated whether or not preceding context disambiguated the meaning, and examined the pattern of fixation durations on the ambiguous word and the remainder of the text. The results indicated that the unlock-able interpretation was preferred; moreover, preceding context did not exert a significant effect until the eyes had initially exited from the target word.
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