Lexical ambiguity, semantic context, and visual word recognition

Tested 2 hypotheses about the recognition of ambiguous words. 24 paid high schoolers and 24 paid college students participated in 2 experiments in which Ss decided whether selected strings of letters were English words. The stimuli included test sequences of 3 words in which the 2nd word had 2 distinct possible meanings, whereas the 1st and 3rd words were related to these meanings in various ways. When the 1st and 3rd words were related to the same meaning of the ambiguous 2nd word (e.g., save-bank-money ), the reaction time (RT) to recognize the 3rd word decreased. But when the 1st and 3rd words were related to different meanings of the 2nd word (e.g., river-bank-money ), the RT for the 3rd word was not reliably different from a control sequence with unrelated words. These data favor the selective-access hypothesis which posits that during recognition, prior semantic context will bias individuals to access one meaning of an ambiguous word rather than another. Selective access to lexical memory is discussed in relation to passive and active models of word recognition.