Previous studies of how working memory (WM) capacity affects lexical ambiguity resolution have been inconclusive about the choice between inhibition and activation comprehension strategies. In contrast, an adaptive inhibition hypothesis suggests that this choice depends on the availability of WM resources. We used a cross-modal semantic priming paradigm. Participants listened to sentences biasing the subordinate meanings of homonyms, presented at a fast or slow speech rate. We measured lexical decision response latencies to target words that were related to either the subordinate or dominant meaning of homonyms. A WM test was used to evaluate participants' WM capacity. At a fast rate, both high and low WM participants activated dominant (or irrelevant) meanings of the subordinate-biased homonyms. At a regular rate, participants with low WM capacity activated dominant meanings; however, participant with high WM inhibited them. Thus, people with high WM activate and inhibit alternative meanings more flexibly than people with low WM.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.99377 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Kadulina, Yara. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | © Yara Kadulina, 2006 |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002572461, proquestno: AAIMR28562, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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