title: The time course of contextual influences during lexical ambiguity resolution: evidence from distributional analyses of fixation durations.
abstract: In the lexical ambiguity literature, it is well-established that readers experience processing difficulties when they encounter biased homographs in a subordinate-instantiating prior context (i.e., the subordinate bias effect). To investigate the time course of this effect, the present study examined distributional analyses of first-fixation durations on 60 biased homographs that were each read twice: once in a subordinate-instantiating context and once in a dominant-instantiating context. Ex-Gaussian fitting revealed that the subordinate context distribution was shifted to the right of the dominant context distribution, with no significant contextual differences in the degree of skew. In addition, a survival analysis technique showed a significant influence of the subordinate versus dominant contextual manipulation as early as 139 ms from the start of fixation. These results indicate that the contextual manipulation had a fast-acting influence on the majority of fixation durations, which is consistent with the reordered access model's assumption that prior context can affect the lexical access stage of reading.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Road N. RM 2037B, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. heather.sheridan@utoronto.ca
authors.forename: Heather
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sheridan
authors.forename: Eyal M
authors.initials: EM
authors.lastname: Reingold
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements / Q000295:instrumentation; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D016011:Normal Distribution; D011578:Psycholinguistics / Q000379:methods*; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D013997:Time Factors; D055815:Young Adult