Context effects and the processing of ambiguous words: further evidence from semantic incongruence

A cross-modal naming experiment was conducted to further verify the effects of context and other lexical information in the processing of Chinese homophones during spoken language comprehension. In this experiment, listeners named aloud a visual probe as fast as they could, at a pre-designated point upon hearing the sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results further support that context has exerted an effect on the disambiguation of various homophonic meanings at an early stage, within the acoustic boundary of the word. This contextual effect was even stronger than the tonal information. Finally, the present results are in line with the context-dependency hypothesis that selection of the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the simultaneous interaction among sentential, tonal and other lexical information during lexical access.