Effect of Semantic Constraints on Processing Ambiguous Words.
David E. Hartman · 1976
ABSTRACT Native English speakers performed a phoneme-monitoring task to assess whether ambiguous words (homographs) require extra processing capacity under two conditions: no prior context and prior context provided by disambiguating subject-noun and verb combinations. Phoneme detection latencies were reliably longer for homographs than for control words when no prior context was provided. This difference disappeared with appropriate subject-noun and verb contexts. These data support a prior-context model for processing ambiguous lexical items. (Author)