Two experiments investigated how textual context is used to disambiguate lexically ambiguous words. Previous research had suggested that context did not guide access toward the contextually appropriate meaning but instead selected this meaning from multiple activated meanings at a later stage of processing. The experiments reported here developed and used a new technique to explore the very early stages of word recognition. Eye movements were measured during reading. In both experiments a "prime" word was briefly displayed during the initial part of the fixation on the "target" word. Priming was measured by comparing fixation times on targets preceded by semantically Related versus Unrelated primes. Experiment 1 showed significant priming effects at a 35 ms prime duration but not at 30 or 25 ms prime durations. In Experiment 2, lexically ambiguous words were used as primes to targets in short passages and were presented for 35 ms. The type of preceding context (Consistent vs. Inconsistent), type of ambiguous prime (Biased vs. Balanced), and strength of instantiated meaning (Dominant vs. Subordinate) were varied. Only when the preceding context was Consistent with the Dominant meaning of a Biased ambiguous word were significant priming effects obtained. These results supported a model of lexical access in which context does guide access toward the contextually appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UMASS/oai:scholarworks.umass.edu:dissertations-8835 |
| Date | 01 January 1993 |
| Creators | Sereno, Sara Crescentia |
| Publisher | ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst |
| Source Sets | University of Massachusetts, Amherst |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest |
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