Processing Homophones Interactively: Evidence from eye-movement data

Abstract

The question of how to process an ambiguous word in context has been long-studied in psycholinguistics and the present study examined this question further by investigating the spoken word recognition processes of Cantonese homophones (a common type of ambiguous word) in context. Sixty native Cantonese listeners were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment. Listeners were instructed to listen carefully to a sentence ending with a Cantonese homophone and then look at different visual probes (either Chinese characters or line-drawing pictures) presented on the computer screen simultaneously. Two findings were observed. First, the results revealed that sentence context exerted an early effect on homophone processes. Second, visual probes that serve as phonological competitors only had a weak effect on the spoken word recognition processes. Consistent with previous studies, the patterns of eye-movement results appeared to support an interactive processing approach in homophone recognition.

Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution in Cantonese Chinese

“…The two span groups were tested further by a standard cross-modal priming task. This task was proved to be a useful paradigm to assess the various lexical and contextual effects on lexical disambiguation process in Chinese [ 35 , 37 , 38 , 41 ]. From the cross-modal priming task, we observed that the high-WM span listeners named the visual probes (disambiguation cue) related to the dominant meaning of the ambiguous word much faster than the probes that related to the subordinate meaning of the ambiguous word and the unrelated control.…”

“…The main focus here is on the numbers of meanings associated with the homophone that our memory system can manage (how many meanings our memory system can hold and sustain as well as how many meanings the system can inhibit rapidly) but not the depth of dominance to the individual meanings (or the order of access between the alternative meanings) of the homophone. This is also the reason why we used the lexical ambiguity resolution of Cantonese homophone to rigorously examine the relationship between WM and spoken language processing [ 11 , 18 , 33 , 37 , 38 ]. Thus, the present results clearly support that the high WM-span listeners can be more flexible to resolve the lexical ambiguity due to the higher mental resource they had to undergo the inhibition process.…”

“…We used a standard cross-modal priming task to evaluate the lexical ambiguation process of Cantonese [ 37 , 38 , 41 ].…”

“…For example, a Cantonese monosyllable /si 1 / has up to 14 meanings (e.g., teacher, lion, silk, corpse, poem, private, think, etc.). Upon hearing the syllable / si 1 / in a neutral sentence (or alone), native Cantonese listeners might or might not be activated all 14 meanings of the single syllable initially until they hear the disambiguation cue in the sentence [ 37 , 38 ]. Therefore, Cantonese monosyllabic homophone (words with identical pronunciation but distinct meanings) is highly ambiguous on a lexical-morphemic level.…”

“…homographs) as the testing target in the present study in order to distinguish clearly how the two approaches of working memory functioned in language processing. In the literature on lexical ambiguity resolution in Chinese language, large amount of evidence supported the context-dependency hypothesis [37][38][39][40][41]. Those results came from a series of experimental studies on this topic, using different experimental designs, tasks and measurements (such as behavioral reaction time and eye-movement data).…”