Lexical ambiguity and sentence comprehension

• Published in: Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 1975-01, Vol.14 (3), p.265-274
• Main Authors: Hogaboam, Thomas W., Perfetti, Charles A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0022-5371; 0749-596X
• DOI: 10.1016/S0022-5371(75)80070-3

Previous models of the computation of word meanings in sentence context have claimed either that context causes only one meaning of an ambiguous word to be processed or that all meanings are processed regardless of context. By contrast, the ordered search model suggested here hypothesizes that access to multiple meanings occurs in a fixed order regardless of context. Thus, whether one meaning or multiple meanings are accessed will depend on whether the primary (most common) sense fits the context. Decision times for determining whether an ambiguous word appearing in an unambiguous context had another possible meaning were consistent with this hypothesis. When the context required the secondary sense, decision times were faster than when the context required the primary sense.