A Study Of Lexical Ambiguity Processing And Resolution By Chinese EFL Learners

Lexical ambiguity is pervasive in natural language,with one lexical form corresponding to more than one semantic interpretation.In theoretical linguistics,ambiguous words are classified as either homonymous or polysemous,depending on the semantic relationships between the multiple interpretations.It is assumed that the meanings of homonyms are semantically incompatible,while the senses of polysemous words are semantically compatible.The mental representation of ambiguous words has always been a focus of psycholinguistic research.It is generally accepted that the meanings of homonyms are represented independently in the mental lexicon,while the semantic representation of polysemous senses is still controversial.Conflicting results on the processing effects of homonymy and polysemy are observed in existing studies.Two theoretical accounts have been put forward in an attempt to provide plausible explanations for inconsistent ambiguity effects.The parallel distributed processing(PDP)model attributes different ambiguity effects to different experimental tasks employed in relevant studies because the polysemy effect often appears in lexical decision tasks,and this effect is replaced by a processing disadvantage in semantic judgment tasks.The semantic settling dynamics(SSD)model,on the other hand,postulates that a diverse set of ambiguity effects reflects that lexical ambiguity processing is a dynamic process related to a question of time course,where ambiguity effects in the early stage of lexical processing are expected to be different from those during later ambiguity processing.To test the explanatory power of the above two accounts on the source of different ambiguity effects,the present study includes both lexical decision and semantic judgment tasks.Ambiguous words do not always appear in isolation in natural language,but are often embedded in sentences.However,when readers or listeners read or hear a sentence containing ambiguous words,they seem to be able to disambiguate lexically ambiguous words effortlessly so as to understand the sentence correctly,without much awareness of the inappropriate ambiguous interpretations.The cognitive mechanism behind this phenomenon has been the focus of psycholinguistic research.Existing studies have generally confirmed the role of context and meaning dominance in lexical ambiguity resolution,but there is still controversy about the stage of processing at which context exerts its influence.Five theoretical models of lexical ambiguity resolution are therefore proposed to determine whether context acts on the semantic integration stage after lexical access to ambiguous words or before lexical recognition of ambiguous words.In order to investigate the stage at which context effects appear,two processing conditions are set up in this study.In addition,biased or unbalanced ambiguous words are usually used in lexical ambiguity processing studies to investigate the accessibility of their dominant and subordinate interpretations under different conditions,and a meaning dominance effect is always observed.Therefore,it is pointed out that the relative frequency of multiple interpretations can modulate ambiguity effects.In view of this,both relative meaning frequency and context are comprehensively considered in this study to explore the ambiguity processing and resolution of different types of ambiguous words by Chinese EFL learners.The research questions addressed in this study are:(1)Is polysemy processed differently from homonymy in isolation?(2)Is polysemy disambiguated differently from homonymy in a sentence context?(3)Does Chinese EFL learners’ second language proficiency affect the semantic processing and resolution of polysemy and homonymy?Two experiments were conducted to answer the above research questions.Experiment 1 involves a lexical decision task under a multi-semantic priming paradigm with a mask and a short stimulus onset asynchrony(SOA).The purpose of Experiment1 is to investigate the processing effects of two types of ambiguous words and the patterns of access to multiple interpretations that differ in relative frequency among Chinese EFL learners.Experiment 2 is a semantic judgment task with a self-paced reading paradigm,aiming to explore the processing effects of two types of ambiguous words in sentence context and to determine the role of context and relative meaning frequency in lexical ambiguity resolution.The results showed that:(1)Both dominant and subordinate interpretations of ambiguous words are active under the multi-semantic priming paradigm,and the two types of lexical ambiguity are processed with advantages in isolation,with polysemes enjoying more processing advantages than homonyms.(2)Polysemous words are disambiguated in a different fashion compared to homonymous words in sentence context.During early ambiguity processing,polysemes are resolved with an advantage,while homonyms are disambiguated with a modest disadvantage.As processing time increases,polysemous words are disambiguated with a disadvantage,and the processing disadvantage for homonymy is much more pronounced.(3)Chinese EFL learners varying in L2 proficiency levels disambiguate polysemes and homonyms in a different way,with more proficient learners following the reordered-access model and their less proficient counterparts following the ordered-access model.The results of this study seem to fit better with the predictions derived from the SSD account.The current study,theoretically speaking,may help to clarify the source of different ambiguity effects,provide empirical evidence for the semantic representation of ambiguous words,and offer behavioral support for the role of context and meaning dominance in lexical ambiguity resolution.From a practical point of view,this study also has some implications for English vocabulary teaching in the Chinese context.