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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution in Cantonese Chinese
1Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, HKSAR, Hong Kong.
Abstract:
The present study examined how working memory functions in the underlying mechanism of the lexical disambiguation process (in activation approach or in inhibition approach). We recruited sixty native Cantonese listeners to participate in two experimental tasks: (a) a Cantonese-version reading span task to measure their working memory (WM) capacity and (b) a standard cross-modal priming task to measure the lexical disambiguation time. The results revealed that (1) the underlying mechanism of the disambiguation process seemed favorable for an inhibition approach and (2) the frequency of the individual meanings of the ambiguous words and the numbers of their meanings might interact with the WM capacity during lexical access, particularly for the low-WM span group.
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