Sentential and discourse topic effects on lexical ambiguity processing: an eye movement examination

Models of lexical ambiguity resolution posit a role for context, but this construct has remained relatively undefined in the literature. The present study isolated two different forms of contextual constraint and examined how these sources of information might differentiate between a selective access and a reordered access model of ambiguity processing. Eye movements were monitored as participants read passages that contained either a balanced or a biased ambiguous word. The sentence containing the ambiguous word was held constant and instantiated either the subordinate meaning (Experiment 1) or the dominant meaning (Experiment 2) through the use of local context. These sentences were embedded in passages in which the topic was consistent, inconsistent, or neutral with respect to the meaning biased by the critical sentence. Experiment 1 provided evidence suggesting that the subordinate meaning of an ambiguous word was not selectively accessed even when sentence and discourse topic information biased that meaning. The data from Experiment 2 provided evidence that even the dominant meaning was not selectively accessed. These contextual sources of information were evaluated in terms of the roles they play in models of lexical ambiguity resolution.