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Bilingual Homonym Disambiguation At The Discourse Level, Yvette Aguilar Baca

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of global context and local context on the time course of activation of cognate homonyms for bilingual readers. Of interest was whether meaning frequency, context, and cross-language activation modulated the time course of activation of the subordinate meaning of cognate homonyms. Also, whether the subordinate bias effect would be altered or even eliminated by the combined influence of such contextual factors and cross-language activation. Eye movements of Spanish-English bilinguals were measured using an eye-tracking device while they read English paragraphs. The paragraphs contained cognate homonyms (e.g. novel/novela), cognate non-homonyms (e.g. …