Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Lexical ambiguity presents challenges in language comprehension.
• Understanding how the brain processes multiple meanings is crucial for cognitive science.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the perceptual complexity of lexically ambiguous versus unambiguous sentences.
• To investigate the role of contextual bias in processing ambiguity.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted comparing word report accuracy and sentence meaning classification.
• Stimuli included rapidly presented ambiguous and unambiguous sentences with and without biasing context.

Main Results:

• Ambiguous words from ambiguous sentences were reported less accurately than unambiguous words.
• Biasing context did not reduce the processing difficulty of ambiguous sentences.
• Sentence meaning classification performance was also affected by ambiguity.

Conclusions:

• Both meanings of a lexically ambiguous word are computed during sentence processing.
• Contextual information does not prevent the initial computation of all possible meanings.
• Lexical ambiguity increases cognitive load during language comprehension.