title: The influence of global discourse on lexical ambiguity resolution.
abstract: The influence of global discourse on the resolution of lexical ambiguity was examined in a series of naming experiments. Two-sentence passages were constructed to bias either the dominant or the subordinate meaning of a homonym that was embedded in a locally ambiguous sentence. The results provided evidence for the immediate (0-msec interstimulus interval) resolution of lexical ambiguity and were subsequently replicated in Experiment 2, in which an 80-msec stimulus onset asynchrony exposure duration was employed for the homonyms. Strong dominant and subordinate biased discourse contexts activated only the contextually appropriate sense of a homonym. In Experiment 3, each sentence of the discourse was presented in isolation. The pattern of activation obtained in Experiments 1 and 2 was found to be contingent on the integration of the two sentences to construct an overall global discourse representation of the text. The results support a context-sensitive model of lexical ambiguity resolution.
authors.affiliation: University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA.
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Vu
authors.forename: G
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kellas
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Metcalf
authors.forename: R
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Herman
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D014796:Visual Perception; D014825:Vocabulary