Hemispheric sensitivities to lexical and contextual information: Evidence from lexical ambiguity resolution

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Abstract

The present study examined the manner in which both hemispheres utilize prior semantic context and relative meaning frequency during the processing of homographs. Participants read sentences biased toward the dominant or the subordinate meaning of their final homograph, or unbiased neutral sentences, and performed a lexical decision task on lateralized targets presented 250 ms after the onset of the sentence-final ambiguous prime. Targets were either related to the dominant or the subordinate meaning of the preceding homograph, or unrelated to it. Performance asymmetry was found in the absence of a biasing context: dominant-related targets were exclusively facilitated in the RVF/LH, whereas both dominant- and subordinate-related targets were facilitated in the LVF/RH. Performance symmetry was found in the presence of a biasing context: dominant-related targets were exclusively activated in dominant-biasing contexts, whereas both dominant- and subordinate-related targets were facilitated in subordinate-biasing contexts. The implications of the results for both general and hemispheric models of word processing are discussed.

Section snippets

1. Introduction

Understanding written words during sentence comprehension requires readers to rapidly access and integrate different sources of information from long-term memory, including lexical knowledge related to the word itself and contextual knowledge related to the sentential context in which the word is embedded. This process is complicated by the fact that many words have more then one distinct meaning and thus part of the comprehension process entails a selection of one of those meanings. Ample

2.1. Participants

Thirty six undergraduate students (18 males), aged 19–28 participated in the study. All subjects were healthy, right handed, native speakers of Hebrew with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.

2.2. Stimuli

The experimental materials consisted of 112 noun–noun polarized Hebrew homographs (both homophonic and heterophonic)

3. Results

A 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 ANOVA was conducted for both RT data and error data across subjects (F1) and items (F2) with type of sentential context (dominant-consistent, subordinate-consistent or unbiased), location of target (RVF or LVF), Target Dominance (dominant or subordinate) and Target Relatedness (related or unrelated) as factors. Cutoff response times of 250 ms for anticipations, and 2500 ms for late responses were used. No data were excluded. Analyses of RTs were based on participants’ mean RT for

4. Discussion

The present study utilized a divided visual-field priming paradigm to further investigate the extent to which each hemisphere uses lexical (frequency) and contextual sources of information during the processing of homographs. Hemispheric asymmetry was found in the absence of a biasing context: dominant meanings were exclusively activated in the LH, whereas both dominant and subordinate meanings were activated in the RH. Hemispheric symmetry was found in the presence of a biasing context:

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by Grant No. 956/06 granted by the Israel Science Foundation to Orna Peleg and Zohar Eviatar.

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