Ambiguity Resolution Of Chinese Heteronyms In Sentence Context

Lexical ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon.At present,most of the researchers use homonyms,homophones and syntactic category ambiguous words as experimental materials to explore lexical ambiguity resolution process.But few choose heteronyms.Moreover,Chinese is a tonal language.The role of phonetic information in lexical recognition has been confirmed by many studies.And what is the effect of segmental information and supra-segmental information on the ambiguity resolution process?We used cumulative window method to reveal heteronyms ambiguities' resolution process in different sentence context.In Experimen 1,the contextual information is located after the target word.Experimen 2 is similar to Experiment l,only the contextual information is located before the target word.According to segmental information and supra-segmental information,target words were divided into four groups.And the contextual information is consistent with either the main meaning or the secondary meaning of ambiguities.Participants were 9 to 13 yesrs old.They read sentences,which contained target words,and answered the questions.Record the correct rate and the time at which the subjects read the target words and context information.The results showed that:(1)In the neutral context,when the contextual information was consistent with the secondary meaning of the ambiguities,the subjects' processing of the disambiguating information was superior to the processing of the non-ambiguous word context information.(2)In the biased sentence context,when the contextual information was consistent with the main meaning of the ambiguities,the process was superior to that when the contextual information was consistent with the secondary meaning.(3)In the biased sentence context,when the contextual information was consistent with the secondary meaning,the ambiguities' resolution process of different heteronyms were different.(4)The phonetic information,the context and its position in the sentences influenced the ambiguity resolution of homonyms.