Christine Guerrera-Mahoney, Kenneth I. Forster & Janet Nicol
University of Arizona
A relatively new technique for presenting sentence stimuli (the 'word maze') was used to investigate the influence of semantic status on the syntactic processing of categorically ambiguous words. In an earlier experiment using a syntactic categorization task (i.e., noun/verb discrimination), semantically related categorical ambiguities (hammer) were compared to frequency matched non-systematic ambiguities (coast). For the non-systematic ambiguities (coast) the mean reaction time for the subordinate sense was slower than that for the dominant sense, but there was no difference in reaction times for related ambiguities (hammer). This raises the possibility that semantic status plays a role in the syntactic processing of categorically ambiguous words. The current experiments were designed to investigate whether this effect also occurs in sentence contexts.
Experiment 1 established the validity of the word maze technique for investigations of sentence processing by replicating eye-movement results that had been obtained by Dopkins, Morris & Rayner (1992). In Experiment 2 related and non-systematic categorical ambiguities were tested in a semantically neutral sentence context using the word maze technique. A dominance effect was observed for both types of ambiguities, although the effect was greater for non-systematic ambiguities. The data obtained thus far demonstrate that (1) semantics may influence syntactic processing at the level of lexical access and integration; and (2) the word maze technique is a new method that can be used to reliably isolate lexical effects in sentence processing.
Reference
Dopkins, S., Morris, R.K. & Rayner, K. (1992). Lexical ambiguity and eye fixations in reading: a test of competing models of lexical ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 461-476.