The Resolution Of English Lexical Ambiguity By Chinese EFL Learners In Sentential Context

It is a common phenomenon in natural language that many words are ambiguous in meaning,but readers seem to have no difficulty in understanding these words in sentential context.The cognitive mechanism behind this phenomenon has been of great interest because it addresses foundational issues regarding the nature of the mental lexicon and lexical access.Lexical ambiguity, according to theoretical linguistic account,can be divided into homonymy, metaphoric polysemy and metonymic polysemy.However,previous studies on the processing of lexical ambiguity in sentential context have mainly focused on homonymy and the models produced are not consistent with each other. Metaphoric polysemy and metonymic polysemy have received little attention. Furthermore,while the disambiguation of lexical ambiguity has been studied previously in native speakers of a language,the disambiguation of such ambiguous words within a second or foreign language remains largely untouched. The present study,through investigating Chinese EFL learners' cognitive processes involved in the disambiguation of three types of English lexical ambiguity,explores the relationship between Chinese EFL learners' representation and accessing patterns of the three types of lexical ambiguity,and then accounts for the characteristics of accessing these ambiguous words in different developmental stages of lexical representation.It raises four research questions:1) How are the Chinese EFL learners' activation patterns of the meanings of the three types of lexical ambiguity in sentential context different from each other? 2) How are the Chinese EFL learners' suppression patterns of the contextually inappropriate meanings of the three types of lexical ambiguity different from each other? 3) How are the Chinese EFL learners' disambiguation patterns of the three types of lexical ambiguity consistent with their mental representation? 4) How does language proficiency affect the disambiguating processes of these ambiguous words?The present study designs three experiments in response to the four research questions.Experiment 1 investigates how the Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiency select the contextually appropriate meanings of homonymy, metaphoric polysemy and metonymic polysemy.It adopts a lexical decision task under priming paradigm in sentential context.Experiment 2 explores how the Chinese EFL learners with different language proficiency suppress the contextually inappropriate meanings of the three types of lexical ambiguity.It utilizes an online semantic fitment judgment task with moving window technique. Experiment 3 investigates how the Chinese EFL leamers with different language proficiency represent the three types of lexical ambiguity in their mental lexicon and how the representation model copes with their disambiguation patterns.It employs a method of questionnaire.The three experiments together contribute the following findings to the resolution of lexical ambiguity by Chinese EFL learners in sentential context:1) The disambiguation of the three types of lexical ambiguity is a two-stage process. At the initial stage,both the dominant and the subordinate meanings are activated. At the post-access stage,only the contextually appropriate meanings are selected, and meanwhile,the contextually inappropriate meanings are suppressed;2) The initial processing of the three types of lexical ambiguity is almost the same, following the Ordered Access Model;3) The post-access disambiguation of the three types of lexical ambiguity is different from each other.The time course of disambiguation for homonymy in sentential context is earlier than those of metaphoric and metonymic polysemy,indicating that sense relatedness affects the disambiguating processes of the three types of lexical ambiguity;4) The Chinese EFL learners' disambiguation of the three types of lexical ambiguity is consistent with their representation of these ambiguous words.The findings of the present study are believed to have contributed to the theoretical construction of lexical access and have rich implications for further studies of EFL learners' processing of lexical ambiguity in sentential context.