Context effects in word identification

Abstract

Word identification comprises both sense activation and sense selection. It is hypothesized that sense activation is affected by associative relationships among words, but not by the thematic context of a discourse. Experiment I confirms this prediction using a crossmodal lexical decision task. Subjects listened to a discourse containing a target word and made a word/nonword decision to a visually presented test string. If the target word was a homograph, test words that were associates of the homograph were primed irrespective of the thematic context. On the other hand, thematically appropriate test words that were not associatively related to the target word were not primed. This result was confirmed in a second experiment where the text was presented visually at a very rapid rate. In contrast, when subjects were given enough time to process each word (Experiment 3), only thematically appropriate associates were primed. No priming effects at all were obtained in a final experiment using a rapid presentation rate where the test word was separated from the target word by two other, interfering words. It is concluded that sense activation functions as a module independent of thematic context.