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Examining Online Syntactic Processing of Spoken Complex Sentences in Chinese Using Dual-Modal Interference Tasks
Published on: September 5, 2019
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Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution in Cantonese Chinese
1Department of Psychology, The Education University of Hong Kong, HKSAR, Hong Kong.
Plos One
|March 10, 2021
Summary
This study shows that working memory (WM) capacity influences how people process ambiguous words, favoring an inhibition approach for lexical disambiguation. Word meaning frequency and number interact with WM capacity, especially in low-WM individuals.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Neuroscience
Background:
- Lexical disambiguation is crucial for language comprehension.
- Understanding the cognitive mechanisms, such as working memory, involved in processing ambiguous words is essential.
- Existing models propose activation or inhibition approaches to explain lexical access.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of working memory (WM) capacity in the lexical disambiguation process.
- To determine whether lexical disambiguation operates via an activation or inhibition approach.
- To explore the interaction between word properties (meaning frequency, number of meanings) and WM capacity during lexical access.
Main Methods:
- Recruited sixty native Cantonese listeners.
- Administered a Cantonese-version reading span task to assess working memory (WM) capacity.
- Utilized a standard cross-modal priming task to measure lexical disambiguation time.
Main Results:
- The findings suggest that the lexical disambiguation process favors an inhibition approach.
- Working memory capacity appears to interact with the frequency and number of meanings of ambiguous words.
- This interaction is particularly pronounced in individuals with low working memory span.
Conclusions:
- Lexical disambiguation likely involves an inhibition mechanism, modulated by working memory.
- Individual differences in working memory capacity affect how ambiguous words are processed.
- Word properties dynamically interact with cognitive resources during lexical access.
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