Prior context and the perception of lexically ambiguous sentences

Abstract

The perceptual complexity of lexically ambiguous and unambiguous sentences was compared in three experiments. In Experiment 1, the report of ambiguous words from rapidly presented ambiguous sentences was worse than the report of corresponding unambiguous words from unambiguous sentences. Results of Experiment 2 showed that the effect was not reduced by the presence of prior biasing context within the sentence. Experiment 3 repeated the finding with a sentence meaning classification task. It was concluded that both meanings of a lexically ambiguous sentence must be computed, even when prior context makes one meaning more plausible than the other.An important factor in the process of comprehending a sentence is the determination of the appropriate meaning of the lexical items. It is usual for a lexical item not only to have multiple grammatical functions, but also to have more than one sense or meaning. Most lexical items have many senses, varying in the degree of semantic relatedness. Clearly, then, rapid selection has to be made between the possible senses of ambiguous words during sentence comprehension, the sense selected being the one that fits in best with the context in which the word occurs. It may be that contextual cues guide the choice of the most plausible sense without any alternative senses being considered, so that no extra processing time is required by the presence of the ambiguous item. On the other hand, it is possible that more than one sense must always be accessed and tested against the context, thereby resulting in additional processing time. It was the intention of the present experiments to try to decide between these two hypotheses.Evidence that the presence of a lexically ambiguous item in a sentence does increase perceptual complexity comes primarily from experiments using the phonememonitor task. Foss (1970), Foss and Jenkins (1973), and Cairns and Kamerman (1975 have shown that reaction times to detect a specified phoneme are longer immediately after ambiguous words than after corresponding unambiguous words. The difference is presumed This research was partly supported by a grant from the A ustralian Research Grants Committee to the lust author. The authors wish to thank Julia Vitale for her assistance in constructing the sentences 'for the lust experiment and Katie Kirby for making up the anomalous items in the last experimen t. Requests for reprints should be addressed to

Accessing lexical ambiguities during sentence comprehension: Effects of frequency of meaning and contextual bias

“…The present data, then, seem critical to support of the exhaustive access position; to accept this theory and rule out the serial self-terminating access model, it was necessary to establish evidence that a low-frequency meaning for an ambiguity is accessed, even in the presence of biasing context that is compatible with the high-frequency meaning for that ambiguity. As argued previously, it appears likely that the Hogaboam and Perfetti results are a function of the use of a technique Finally, the present experiments also provide confirmation of the somewhat more indirect support given to the exhaustive access model by Cairns and Hsu (1980), Holmes et al (1977), Lackner and Garrett (1972), SWinney (1979), andTanenhaus et al (1979).2 Further, the results of the examination of the time course of lexical meaning activation provide verification of a number of additional facts that have been posited concerning the lexical processing system. In summary, lexical access appears to be an exhaustive and autonomous subroutine of the sentence comprehension process (autonomous in the sense that it does not appear to be driven or guided by previously occurring semantic information).…”

“…From this, it was concluded that both meanings of the ambiguity were accessed, at least momentarily, thus providing the facilitation for lexical decisions to words related to each of those meanings. In other recent work, Holmes, Arwas, and Garrett (1977) have shown that time to classify an unbiased sentence as meaningful is increased by the presence of a lexical ambiguity and that the number of words correctly recalled under the rapid serial visual presentation technique is, likewise, smaller in the presence of an ambiguity (Chodorow, 1979, has found a similar result in the auditory domain). Cairns and Hsu (1980) have also recently supported this contention using a phoneme monitoring technique (as have HolleyWilcox & Blank, 1980, in nonsententiallexical decision experiments) .…”

“…However, here the waters become slightly muddy. In support of this basic position, we find, among other work, studies by Cairns and Hsu (I980), Holmes et al (1977), Lackner and Garrett (1972), Swinney (1979), and Tanenhaus, Leiman, and Seidenberg (1979), each of which has used different experimental tasks to examine the effects of context on lexical access.…”

A Model of Lexical Access of Ambiguous Words

“…The modular view holds that all meanings of the word are initially accessed, since the lexical access mechanism can't "know" what the context requires, and all meanings are then passed to the integration level, where context selects the proper one (the Post Decision Hypothesis). Early research produced mixed results, some studies supporting one hypothesis, some the other (Conrad, 1974;Foss and Jenkins, 1973;Holmes, 1977;Lackner andGarret, 1972: Swinney andHakes, 1976). However, most of these studies only looked at one time point of the process, which as later results show, explains the discrepancy.…”

Controlling for homophone polarity and prime-target relatedness in the cross-modal lexical decision task

“…A major issue addressed in previous research has been whether lexical access to alternative meanings of ambiguous words is context-dependent or initially exhaustive, with context operating on "postaccess" processes. Past cross-modal studies, however, may have failed to adequately control the polarity of ambiguous items (i.e., the degree to which one word sense dominated over the other) and the relatedness of the ambiguous items to the lexical targets (Holmes, Arwas, & Garrett, 1977;Onifer & Swinney, 1981;Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982;Swinney, 1979; Tabossi, 1988; Tabossi, Colombo, & Job, 1987; Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Seidenberg, 1979).…”