Abstract
Language ambiguity results from, among other things, the vagueness of the syntactic structure of phrases and whole sentences. Numerous types of syntactic ambiguity are associated with the placement of the phrase boundary. A special case of the segmentation problem is the phenomenon of word boundary ambiguities; in spoken natural language words coalesce, making it possible to interpret them in different ways (e.g., a name vs. an aim). The purpose of the study was to verify whether the two meanings of words with boundary ambiguities are activated, or whether it is a case of semantic context priming. The study was carried out using the cross-modality semantic priming paradigm. Sentences containing phrases with word boundary ambiguities were presented in an auditory manner to the participants. Immediately after, they performed a visual lexical decision task. Results indicate that both meanings of the ambiguity are automatically activated — independently of the semantic context. When discussing the results I refer to the autonomous and interactive models of parsing, and show other possible areas of research concerning word boundary ambiguities.
Highlights
IntroductionResearch results on this subject have influenced the creation of various models for lexical access, which explain the process of word activation while using a language (recognizing and recalling words, when we listen or read or when we speak or write) (see Reeves, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 1998)
The purpose of the analysis carried out here was to measure the differences between mean reaction times to target words in each category in the ambiguous condition
The results showed that there were no significant differences between reaction times to words related to the first meaning of the presented phrase and reaction times to the words related to the second meaning of the presented phrase, F(1, 165) = 0.28, p =
Summary
Research results on this subject have influenced the creation of various models for lexical access, which explain the process of word activation while using a language (recognizing and recalling words, when we listen or read or when we speak or write) (see Reeves, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 1998). It is often highlighted (e.g., Gleason & Ratner, 1998) that studies focused on managing syntactic ambiguity enrich knowledge about the parsing process, computing the syntactic structure of the sentence. According to the two-stage model, all meanings of ambiguous words are initially activated and discarded at a later stage (i.e., the context is very quickly used to select the appropriate sense) (Davis, Marslen-Wilson, & Gaskell, 2002; Martin, Vu, Kellas, & Metcalf, 1999; Simpson, 1984)
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