Context and lexical access: implications of nonword interference for lexical ambiguity resolution

To eliminate potential "backward" priming effects, Glucksberg, Kreuz, and Rho (1986) introduced a variant of the cross-modal lexical priming task in which subjects made lexical decisions to nonword targets that were modeled on a word related to either the contextually biased or unbiased sense of an ambiguous word. Lexical decisions to nonwords were longer than controls only when the nonword was related to the contextually biased sense of the ambiguous word, leading Glucksberg et al. to conclude that context does constrain lexical access and that the multiple access pattern observed in previous studies was probably an artifact of backward priming. We did not find nonword interference when the nonword targets used by Glucksberg et al. were preceded by semantically related ambiguous or unambiguous word primes. However, we did replicate their sentence context results when the ambiguous words were removed from the sentences. We conclude that the interference obtained by Glucksberg et al. is due to postlexical judgements of the congruence of the sentence context and the target, not to context constraining lexical access.