EFFECTS OF GLOBAL AND LOCAL CONTEXT ON LEXICAL PROCESSING DURING LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION

Nine experiments involving young adults (N = 525) tested the roles of local (sentence) and global (discourse) contexts on lexical processing . Contextual material was presented auditorily, and naming times for t he last (visually presented) word were collected. Experiment 1 tested the local contexts alone and found facilitation of naming latencies wh en local contexts were related to the target word. Subsequent experime nts, using Varying baseline conditions, found that globally related ma terial affected naming latency in all cases, whereas the same locally related material that was used in the first study now had no facilitat ion effect. The globally related material had an immediate effect on n aming times. The authors argue that the results are inconsistent with associatively based models and with various hybrid models of context e ffects and that a discourse-based model best accounts for the data.