Syntactic And Contextual Effects On Online Processing L2 Homographs

It is well-established that readers experience processing difficulties when they encounter ambiguous words in a single sentence or a short discourse.To investigate how readers deal with activating and integrating the appropriate meaning during reading,the research reported here addresses the online processing of biased homographs in an elaborated sentential context by Chinese EFL learners.Specifically,this study aims to explore whether repeated presentation of target words in a strong biasing context and different meaning frequency have an effect on the processing of homographs of different levels of Chinese EFL learners.Homographs are those wherein two or even more meanings are contained.Sentential context refers to syntactic,semantic and other linguistic information provided by the sentence in which a particular word is embedded.Our experiment was controlled and programmed by E-Prime 2.0 psychological testing software.In the self-paced reading task,60 English L2 learners who spoke Chinese as their first language took part in our experiment.We examined the processing of biased homographs preceded by single-sentence,either subordinate-instantiating or dominant-instantiating contexts,and the target and control sentences were manipulated to vary whether this preceding context contained a prior instance of the homograph or a control word/phrase.The RTs of participants reading the target word itself and the word immediately following the ambiguous target word,as well as the accurate rate of comprehension questions were recorded.The collected data were analysed in one-way ANOVA and repeated measures ANOVA.The findings showed that: 1)for both groups,the dominant repeated condition after a strong biasing context that contained a prior occurrence of the target homograph revealed a small numerical processing advantage compared with the dominant nonrepeated condition,but the facilitation of repetition never approached statistically significant;2)reduction in the Subordinate Bias Effect could only be observed by the intermediate participants in the subordinate-instantiating context;3)the advanced participants read significantly faster and responded more accurately than the intermediate participants;4)the Subordinate Bias Effect was replicated by producing longer mean reading times in the subordinate than in the dominant across all experimental conditions.