Dominance and context effects on activation of alternative homophone meanings

Two eyetracking-during-listening experiments showed frequency and context effects on fixation probability for pictures representing multiple meanings of homophones. Participants heard either an imperative sentence instructing them to look at a homophone referent (Experiment 1) or a declarative sentence that was either neutral or biased toward the homophone’s subordinate meaning (Experiment 2). At homophone onset in both experiments, the participants viewed four pictures: (1) a referent of one homophone meaning, (2) a shape competitor for a nonpictured homophone meaning, and (3) two unrelated filler objects. In Experiment 1, meaning dominance affected looks to both the homophone referent and the shape competitor. In Experiment 2, as compared with neutral contexts, subordinate-biased contexts lowered the fixation probability for shape competitors of dominant meanings, but shape competitors still attracted more looks than would be expected by chance. We discuss the consistencies and discrepancies of these findings with the selective access and reordered access theories of lexical ambiguity resolution.