Abstract
Two experiments were conducted to investigate the process involved in selecting the contextually appropriate meaning of a homograph. Both experiments employed a grammaticality decision task. In Experiment 1, the primary (more frequent) and secondary (less frequent) meanings of homographs were used as the target items requiring a “yes” decision. The results indicated that the effect of relative frequency of these meanings of homographs was reduced when the target word was preceded either by a semantically congruous or anomalous sentence context relative to when it was preceded by the grammatical morpheme “the” or “to.” Experiment 2 indicated that “no” decisions were consistently slower for syntactically unambiguous, but semantically ambiguous words (e.g., ORGAN, FEET) than for syntactically and semantically unambiguous words (e.g., CENT, LEND), irrespective of the type of preceding context. The results, taken as a whole, are best interpreted within the postaccess inhibition model of sentence-context effects suggested by Forster (1981).
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The ideas for the experiments reported in this paper were inspired by an unpublished honors research thesis carried out by Vivien Bainbridge in 1981 under the supervision of Ken Forster at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.
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Kinoshita, S. Sentence context effects on lexically ambiguous words: Evidence for a postaccess inhibition process. Memory & Cognition 13, 579–595 (1985). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198328
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198328