Lexical information processing during sentence comprehension

Abstract

This article reports two experiments, a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment, conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from the same population. There are three major conclusions: ( a ) That in the case of ambiguous lexical items, all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to working memory; ( b ) that the two experimental tasks investigated do not tap the same psycholinguistic processes; and ( c ) that there is a lexical retrieval stage operable in both comprehension and production which affects response latencies.