The influence of global discourse on lexical ambiguity resolution

The influence of global discourse on the resolution of lexical ambiguity wa s examined in a series of naming experiments. Two-sentence passages were co nstructed to bias either the dominant or the subordinate meaning of a homon ym that was embedded in a locally ambiguous sentence. The results provided evidence for the immediate (0-msec interstimulus interval) resolution of le xical ambiguity and were subsequently replicated in Experiment 2, in which an 80-msec stimulus onset asynchrony exposure duration was employed for the homonyms. Strong dominant and subordinate biased discourse contexts activa ted only the contextually appropriate sense of a homonym. In Experiment 3, each sentence of the discourse was presented in isolation. The pattern of a ctivation obtained in Experiments 1 and 2 was found to be contingent on the integration of the two sentences to construct an overall global discourse representation of the text. The results support a context-sensitive model o f lexical ambiguity resolution.