Sources of sentence constraint on lexical ambiguity resolution (original) (raw)

Semantic Priming Effects in Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

1981

The study addresses a number of issues related to the effects of biasing semantic contexts on the processing of words with more than one meaning (homographs). Biasing contexts have been taken to either constrain “lexical access” to a contextually relevant meaning of a homograph (selective access), or to exert a selective effect only after access to all, or some subset

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

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 1989

To eliminate potential "backward" priming effects, 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 judgments of the congruence of the sentence context and the target, not to context constraining lexical access.

Effects of constraint and validity of sentence contexts on lexical decisions

Memory & Cognition, 1985

According to the two-process model of Posner and Snyder (1975), cue stimuli can influence subsequent performance by the separate or additive processes of automatic pathway activation and attentional expectancies. According to the model, facilitation can be produced by either process, but attentional facilitation is accompanied by inhibition for unexpected tests. The inhibition of lexical decision latency, by this logic, suggests that the context is used to form expectancies about possible test words, and the occurrence of incongruous test words involves redirection of attention, slowing the response. Early support for the two-process model came from a series of studies by Stanovich and West (1979, 1981) showing that, when a naming task was used, facilitation was obtained in the absence of inhibition. It was argued that, for adult readers, naming a word was a highly overlearned and rapid response, one that occurred too fast for conscious expectancies to influence naming speed. Conversely, the facilitation was caused by an automatic spread of activity from words or concepts in the context related to the test word. Other studies by Stanovich and West provided further support for this interpretation. First, facilitation of naming is greater, and inhibition often becomes significant, for less skilled readers, for whom word recognition is less automatic (Stanovich, West,

Lexical Processing of Ambiguous Words: Dominance or Associative Strength?

The Spanish journal of psychology, 2005

Four experiments examined the role of meaning frequency (dominance) and associative strength (measured by associative norms) in the processing of ambiguous words in isolation. Participants made lexical decisions to targets words that were associates of the more frequent (dominant) or less frequent (subordinate) meaning of a homograph prime. The first two experiments investigated the role of associative strength at long SOAs (Stimulus Onset Asynchrony) (750 ms.), showing that meaning is facilitated by the targets' associative strength and not by their dominance. The last two experiments traced the role associative strength at short SOAs (250 ms), showing that the manipulation of the associative strength has no effect in the semantic priming. The conclusions are: on the one hand, semantic priming for homographs is due to associative strength manipulations at long SOAs. On the other hand, the manipulation of the associative strength has no effect when automatic processes (short SOAs) are engaged for homographs.

Lexical Access in the Processing of Word Boundary Ambiguity

Social Psychological Bulletin, 2018

Language ambiguity results from, among other things, the vagueness of the syntactic structure of phrases and whole sentences. Numerous types of syntactic ambiguity are associated with the placement of the phrase boundary. A special case of the segmentation problem is the phenomenon of word boundary ambiguities; in spoken natural language words coalesce, making it possible to interpret them in different ways (e.g., a name vs. an aim). The purpose of the study was to verify whether the two meanings of words with boundary ambiguities are activated, or whether it is a case of semantic context priming. The study was carried out using the cross-modality semantic priming paradigm. Sentences containing phrases with word boundary ambiguities were presented in an auditory manner to the participants. Immediately after, they performed a visual lexical decision task. Results indicate that both meanings of the ambiguity are automatically activated-independently of the semantic context. When discussing the results I refer to the autonomous and interactive models of parsing, and show other possible areas of research concerning word boundary ambiguities.

Effects of semantic context and expectancy in a lexical decision and naming task

Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, 1992

Reported differences in the sensitivity of the lexical decision and naming tasks to post1exical processes was investigated in a single-word priming study. Relatedness probability was manipulated with an "induction set" presented to subjects prior to the onset of the actual test stimuli. In the naming task, exposure to an induction set with a high probability of related word pairs produced both facilitation and inhibition, whereas exposure to an induction set with a high probability of unrelated word pairs resulted in similar response times to all word targets. Significant facilitation was observed in the lexical decision task, regardless of the relatedness probability of the induction set. These data suggest that under certain circumstances the naming task is sensitive to postrecognition contextual effects, and they do not support the use of the lexical decision and naming tasks as methodological tools with which to a priori distinguish pre-and postcontextual effects in word recognition.

The Influence of the Experimental Context on Lexical Ambiguity Effects

Teme, 2022

Previous research with the visual lexical decision task demonstrated that polysemous words (multiple related senses) have a processing advantage when compared to unambiguous words, whereas homonymous words (multiple unrelated meanings) have a processing disadvantage. Although the same pattern of results was observed in Serbian, the two effects were investigated in separate studies. The aim of this study was to test whether the effects can be replicated when both types of ambiguity are presented within the same experimental list. To test this, we conducted three experiments. In the first one, the mixed presentation of unambiguous, homonymous, and polysemous words did not reveal any of the ambiguity effects, leading to the conclusion that the experimental context may affect the emergence of ambiguity effects. The other two experiments were conducted to explicitly control for the experimental context. In both experiments, we presented each ambiguity type within the same block and counterbalanced the order of the block presentation. These experiments revealed the presence of the polysemy advantage, but not the homonymy disadvantage, which is a common pattern in literature. Polysemy effects typically emerge relatively easily, whereas the homonymy disadvantage requires additional conditions. Finally, we conclude that experimental context does play a role in ambiguity processing, although the order of presentation does not affect the overall results.

Understanding words in sentence contexts: The time course of ambiguity resolution

Brain and language, 2003

Spoken language comprehension requires rapid integration of information from multiple linguistic sources. In the present study we addressed the temporal aspects of this integration process by focusing on the time course of the selection of the appropriate meaning of lexical ambiguities (''bank'') in sentence contexts. Successful selection of the contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word is dependent upon the rapid binding of the contextual information in the sentence to the appropriate meaning of the ambiguity. We used the N400 to identify the time course of this binding process. The N400 was measured to target words that followed three types of context sentences. In the concordant context, the sentence biased the meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous word so that it was related to the target. In the discordant context, the sentence context biased the meaning so that it was not related to the target. In the unrelated control condition, the sentences ended in an unambiguous noun that was unrelated to the target. Half of the concordant sentences biased the dominant meaning, and the other half biased the subordinate meaning of the sentence-final ambiguous words. The ISI between onset of the target word and offset of the sentence-final word of the context sentence was 100 ms in one version of the experiment, and 1250 ms in the second version. We found that (i) the lexically dominant meaning is always partly activated, independent of context, (ii) initially both dominant and subordinate meaning are (partly) activated, which suggests that contextual and lexical factors both contribute to sentence interpretation without context completely overriding lexical information, and (iii) strong lexical influences remain present for a relatively long period of time.