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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Mar 2, 2026

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Eye Tracking During Visually Situated Language Comprehension: Flexibility and Limitations in Uncovering Visual Context Effects

Published on: November 30, 2018

Do resource constraints affect lexical processing? Evidence from eye movements.

Mallorie Leinenger¹, Mark Myslín², Keith Rayner¹

¹Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego.

Journal of Memory and Language

|May 16, 2017

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Understanding human language ambiguity is key. This study found that resolving word meaning difficulty depends on the meaning itself, not the surrounding text length, challenging some cognitive models.

Keywords:

digging-in effects eye movements lexical ambiguity reading

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Area of Science:

Cognitive Science
Psycholinguistics
Human Cognition

Background:

Human language comprehension involves resolving lexical ambiguity efficiently.
Previous research on cognitive resource constraints during ambiguity resolution yielded conflicting findings.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate cognitive resource constraints during lexical ambiguity resolution.
To test the influence of intervening text length on resolving homograph meanings.

Main Methods:

Two experiments using eye-tracking methodology.
Embedding moderately biased homographs in sentences with varying text lengths before disambiguation.
Analyzing disambiguation to dominant versus subordinate interpretations.

Main Results:

The length of intervening text did not affect the ease of ambiguity resolution.
Disambiguating to the subordinate meaning of a homograph was consistently more difficult.
Results support probabilistic and reordered access models of language comprehension.

Conclusions:

Cognitive resource limitations do not appear to constrain lexical ambiguity resolution in the manner suggested by capacity-constrained models.
The difficulty in resolving ambiguity is primarily driven by the nature of the meaning accessed (dominant vs. subordinate).