Influence of contextual features on the activation of ambiguous word meanings.
Three studies examined whether initial meaning activation is sensitive to context. Experiment 1 demonstrated that contextually appropriate targets were activated more than inappropriate targets. Experiment 2 evaluated activation across intervals of 0, 300, and 600 ms. Constraining sentences activated contextually appropriate meanings over inappropriate meanings. This was maintained across the intervals for highly salient targets. Less-salient targets, although initially activated, were no longer activated 300 ms following the homograph. Experiment 3 converged on context-sensitive activation following a 50-ms exposure of the sentence-final homograph. Conclusions are (a) initial meaning activation can be sensitive to context, (b) when a homograph is instantiated, it is congruent with a broad scope of targets, and (c) less-salient targets receive less activation over the time course.
Paul
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Department of Psychology, University of Kansas, Lawrence 66045.
Kellas
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Martin
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Clark
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D000328:Adult; D001288:Attention; D003210:Concept Formation; D006801:Humans; D011939:Mental Recall; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning