Chinese Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

Lexical ambiguous words are frequently used in our daily life.According to the part of speech,lexical ambiguous words can be divided into within class ambiguous words(e.g.“bank”)and cross class ambiguous words(e.g.“watch”).Although there are large quantities of studies on the process of lexical ambiguity resolution,results are inconsistent with some of them in favor of the modular model and the others supporting the interactive model.In the process of cross class ambiguity resolution,there is some doubt whether the syntactic context information can facilitate this process or not.As the aging of population has become a worldwide trend,it is worthwhile to spend time and energy researching the language of the old.However,there are only a small number of studies concerning the process of lexical ambiguity resolution of the aged.Therefore,on the basis of the former studies of lexical ambiguity resolution,the present study aims to solve the following two questions:(1)can old adults achieve young-like performance in the resolution of Chinese lexical ambiguity?(2)does the resolution of within class ambiguous words support the modular model or the interactive model? And do syntactic constraints play a role in the resolution of cross class ambiguous words or not?Within class ambiguous words are embedded into semantically-biased dominant meaning or subordinate meaning congruent sentences and cross class ambiguous words are embedded into both semantically and syntactically-biased dominant or subordinate meaning congruent sentences.Employing ERP technology,young adults and old adults read these sentences in a natural way.Experimental results at the basis of SPSS are shown as follows.Group level analysis shows that both young adults and old adults in within class ambiguity resolution elicit a negative wave called N400 component in the subordinate meaning condition,which means that frequency information is strong enough to limit the effect of context although context has indeed activated the subordinate meaning.In this way,within class ambiguity resolution obeys interactive model.However,the N400 component of the old turns out to be more pronounced and delayed,indicating the old have more difficulty processing theresolution of ambiguous words.Besides,the old tend to exploit both hemispheres while the young have more tendencies to use their left hemispheres in this process.In the time window of 650ms-900 ms,young adults have a more obvious LPC component which begins earlier than the older adults,suggesting older adults fail to make the most of additional resources like attention processing and memory comparison to revise the initial interpretation.For cross class ambiguity resolution,there is no obvious ERP component in visual inspection of young adults,and ANOVA analysis shows no significant main effect of frequency.As for the older adults,there is a less obvious N400 component and a delayed LPC component.Therefore,the syntactic contextual information can facilitate the process of lexical ambiguity resolution.Results in this present study indicate that there are generally some age-related differences in the process of lexical ambiguity resolution.The old generally have more difficulty in meaning activation and resolution;and they fail to use additional resources like attention processing and memory comparison to revise the initial interpretation.Besides,they tend to use both hemispheres while the young exploit the left hemisphere.However,individual level analysis shows that the old adults who have higher working memory capacity and reading exposure time can behave young-like performance in ambiguity resolution.Results also suggest that the present study support the interactive model of lexical ambiguity resolution rather than the modular model and the syntactic contextual information can facilitate this process.