The Effect of Sense Relatedness on Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Evidence from Chinese Verbs

[[abstract]]This thesis adopts a psycholinguistic approach to examine how different types of lexical ambiguity are resolved and processed during sentence comprehension. Previous findings on lexical ambiguity resolution were contradictory: some studies took a modular position, which suggested that different levels of processing system operate independently and thus contextual information from the discourse level would not immediately influence the access of a word’s meaning at the lexical level (e.g. Ahrens, 1998, 2001; Onifer & Swinney, 1981; Swinney, 1979); others took an interactive position, which argued that sentential context could have an immediate effect on lexical access (e.g. Li & Yip, 1996, 1998; Tabossi, Colombo, & Job, 1987; Tabossi & Zardon, 1993). However, it was observed that most research to date has not distinguished different types of ambiguity in their experiments, which may hence influence the results. Lexical ambiguity has been traditionally differentiated into homonymy and polysemy, with respect to the dimension of relatedness of its multiple meanings. A number of psycholinguistic studies concerning the semantics of ambiguous words did provide empirical evidence for the processing distinction between homonymy and polysemy, and some of the studies further pointed out their underlying differences on meaning representations in the mental lexicon (e.g. Azuma & Van Orden, 1997; Frazier & Rayner, 1990; Klepousniotou, 2002). The main purpose of this thesis, therefore, is to investigate whether two types of ambiguity, homonymy and polysemy, have different processing mechanisms during on-line sentence comprehension, by conducting a cross-modal lexical priming experiment. The results of the present study showed that homonymy and polysemy did perform distinct processing patterns on the resolution of lexical ambiguity. For a homonymous word, only the contextually appropriate meaning was accessed, whereas both meanings of a polysemous word were activated at an early stage of semantic access. Our findings suggest that inconsistent results in previous literature might be confounded by the relatedness of multiple meanings, and thus the effect of sense relatedness should not be overlooked in the issue of lexical ambiguity resolution. Furthermore, the distinct processing patterns between homonymy and polysemy could be explained in terms of their different lexical representations: while meanings of a homonymous word are stored distinctly and separately, multiple related meanings of a polysemous word are stored and listed under a single core sense.