Abstract
Lexical ambiguity research over the last two decades is reviewed, with a focus on how that literature applies to understanding the resolution of meaning for words. Early models of ambiguity processing dealt almost exclusively with the time course of the effects of context on lexical access, in order to address the issue of modularity of lexical access. Newer models of ambiguity processing accommodate recent findings of early context effects that are contingent on both strength of context and meaning frequency. The most important contribution of these newer models of ambiguity processing is not to the modularity debate, but to investigation of the range of parameters affecting the entire meaning resolution process, including meaning access as well as the integration of meanings into context. As an example of this approach, we describe a simple quantitative model of meaning resolution that subsumes many other models as parametric variations.
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This research was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) doctoral scholarship and a Killam doctoral scholarship to L.T. and by an NSERC research grant to P.D. The authors thank Gay Bisanz, Norman Brown, Bruce Derwing, Jeff Bisanz, Mike Masson, Greg Simpson, Stephen Paul, and anonymous reviewers for comments and helpful discussions on earlier versions of the paper.
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Twilley, L.C., Dixon, P. Meaning resolution processes for words: A parallel independent model. Psychon Bull Rev 7, 49–82 (2000). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210725
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210725