Effects of prior context upon lexical access during sentence comprehension

Abstract

The effects of disambiguating prior contexts upon the processing of lexical ambiguities in sentences were investigated. Subjects listened to lexically ambiguous (or unambiguous control) sentences under one of three conditions: a neutral prior context, a disambiguating context occurring immediately prior to the ambiguity, or a disambiguating context occurring in a prior sentence. Subjects monitored for phonemes which occurred immediately after each ambiguous or control word. In the neutral context condition, reaction times were significantly longer following ambiguous words than following their controls. For both the immediate and distant context conditions, the ambiguity-control contrast was not significant The results were interpreted as support for a model of sentence processing in which a prior disambiguating context serves to restrict access to readings for an ambiguous word.