Abstract
Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read biased ambiguous target words in the context of a short paragraph. Two aspects of context were manipulated. The global context was presented in the topic sentence of the paragraph and instantiated either the dominant or the subordinate meaning of biased ambiguous target words (those with highly dominant meanings). Local contextual information either preceded or followed the target word and was always consistent with the subordinate interpretation. Consistent with prior research, we obtained a subordinate bias effect wherein readers looked longer at the ambiguous words than control words when the preceding context instantiated the subordinate meaning. More importantly, the magnitude of the subordinate bias effect was the same when global context alone, local context alone, or local and global context combined were consistent with the subordinate meaning of the ambiguous word. The results of this study indicate that global contextual information (1) has an immediate impact on lexical ambiguity resolution when no local disambiguating information is available, (2) has no additional effect when it is consistent with local information, but (3) does have a slightly delayed effect when inconsistent with local information.
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The data reported in this article are based on a master's thesis submitted by G.K. to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts. The research was supported by GrantHD17426 from the National Institutes of Health. G.K. was supported by a predoctoral traineeship on Grant MH16745 from the National Institute of Mental Health. K.R. was supported by a Research Scientist Award (MH01255) from the National Institute of Mental Health.
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Kambe, G., Rayner, K. & Duffy, S.A. Global context effects on processing lexically ambiguous words: Evidence from eye fixations. Memory & Cognition 29, 363–372 (2001). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194931
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03194931