Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Context Effects And Lexical Ambiguity Processing: An Activation-Based Account, Frazier Orgain

Master's Theses

Many studies have been conducted to test the effects of ambiguous words in sentence processing. There are two views: the modularity hypothesis and the interactive hypothesis that dominate this field of study. The effect of ambiguity has been tested in many ways, including gating, cross-modal priming, naming, and self-paced reading. This utilizes the methods of self paced reading with lexical decision and naming tasks to examine the hypotheses as they relate to the access period of lexical differentiation. Results indicate that context has an immediate effect, after which participants look to other factors to discern meaning of a sentence. Details …