Time Course Of Phonological And Semantic Activation: Perceiving Words Without Initial Syllable In Sentence Context

The phonological and semantic activation of auditory words is focused bypsycholinguists for a long time. Recent researches focused on ambiguous words and unambiguous words. Two hypotheses occur: exhaustive access and context-dependency. In this paper, words without initial syllable were used as target words to address when and how does the semantic context affect its interpretation. Four experiments is included: In Exp 1, the factors that influenced the comprehension of the auditory words were probed into via the method used by Rapp, David N. et al., 2002; In Exp 2 and 3, the context-dependency and the exhaustive access in the early phase of the comprehension is addressed; In Exp 4, the phonological activation is focused again in the later phase of the comprehension process. The results show that target words will be influenced by exhaustive access, which will activate several similar words in a very short time, and guided by the context, at the beginning, within 400ms. In addition, phonology will be activated twice, which different from the results done before, and the target words will be renovated by the guide from the interaction between semantic activation and the second phonological activation.