Abstract
The influence of sentence focus on the lexical processing of ambiguous words during language comprehension was investigated by means of a cross-modal semantic priming task which was combined with a procedure for manipulating sentence focus ( A. Cutler & J. A. Fodor's (1979, Cognition, 7, 49–59) focus-identifying task). The main findings were that both readings of an ambiguous word were activated at its offset if the ambiguous word formed part of the semantic focus of the sentence; no reading was activated if the ambiguous word was placed outside of focus. However, with a delay of 350 ms, the contextually biased reading was activated on both focus conditions. These results suggest that sentence focus may affect the process of lexical recognition immediately—mainly by affecting its form-driven parts. The consequences of this view are discussed in regard to current debates of lexical access, context effects, and the modularity thesis.
Published Version
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