Effects Of Discourse Context And Lexical Frequency On Resolving Syntactic Category Ambiguous Words In Chinese

1 The Research IssuesAt present, in domain of lexical ambiguities resolution, there are four theory models. It is multiple access model, selective access model, order-access model and reordered access model, respectively.The bone of contention between these four models is the effects of discourse context and lexical frequency on the meaning access phase of ambiguous words. In the four models, the multiple access model insists on that neither context nor lexical frequency affect this phase; the selective access model insists on that not lexical frequency but context affects the phase; the standpoint of order-access model is that only lexical frequency affects the phase; but contrasts with all these three models, the reordered access model deems that both lexical frequency and context affect the phase of meaning access.From 1970s, for the sake of validating these four models, psychologists have made many experiments, but their results were not consistent with each other.By penetrating with these researches, we found the chief limitations rested with two aspects: one was the experimental techniques, the other was the experimental materials.Based on these two aspects, we adopted a new method-the natural reading and sound surveying, and the discourse context for investigating the focal issue: whether context and lexical frequency affect the meaning access of ambiguous words or not.2 The PurposesBy investigating the reading time of each word in the target sentences which contained syntactic category ambiguous words, this thesis wants to discuss the effects of discourse context and lexical frequency on resolving lexical ambiguities in the first phase-the meaning access phase (the generation phase), and the second phase-subsequent meaning conformity phase (the selection phase). The thesis will also discuss the relation between discourse context and lexical frequency; and test the correlative theory models.3 The Research Hypotheses1. Discourse context and lexical frequency do influence the whole process of resolving lexical ambiguities.2. The relation between discourse context and lexical frequency is completelyindependent.3. Insists on the Discourse-Guided Selection Hypothesis; and rejects the Discourse-Guided Generation Hypothesis. That is, persists in discourse context only reacting on the selection phase.4. Lexical frequency does not react on the generation phase. In this phase, the high meaning and the low meaning of the ambiguous words are both automatic accessed.4 The Whole Research Logical FrameThree experiments investigated the resolving of syntactic category ambiguities in a natural reading paradigm, using surveying sound presentation.The first experiment reported the collection of normative data to measure the degree to which each homograph was biased toward use as a high meaning or use as a low meaning.The second experiment tested the validity of the discourse bias for relevant target sentences.The goal of the third experiment was to determine how discourse context and lexical frequency influenced the generation phase and the selection phase; and this was investigated by designing ten reading-time regions in the target sentence.4 Brief Introduction Of Experiment 35.1 MethodParticipants. Thirty-two undergraduates from Yunnan Normal University took part. All were native speakers of Chinese. Although the same population was used in experiment 1 and 2, no student participated in more than one study.Variable and Experiment Design. There were two independent variables. One was lexical frequency, and the other was discourse context. The lexical frequency had two levels: high meaning (H) and low meaning (L). The discourse context also had two levels: biasing high meaning (H) and biasing low meaning (L). Lexical frequency and discourse context were crossed in a two-by-two design. Thus, we had four treatment combinations: HH, HL, LH, LL, respectively.The dependent variable was reading time. Nine consecutive...