LEXICAL ACCESS DURING SENTENCE COMPREHENSION - (RE)CONSIDERATION OF CONTEXT EFFECTS

The effects of prior semantic context upon lexical access during sentence comprehension were examined in two experiments. In both studies, subjects comprehended auditorily presented sentences containing lexical ambiguities and simultaneously performed a lexical decision task upon visually presented letter strings. Lexical decisions for visual words related to each of the meanings of the ambiguity were facilitated when these words were presented simultaneous with the end of the ambiguity (Experiment 1). This effect held even when a strong biasing context was present. When presented four syllables following the ambiguity, only lexical decisions for visual words related to the contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguity were facilitated (Experiment 2). Arguments are made for autonomy of the lexical access process of a model of semantic context effects is offered. © 1979 Academic Press, Inc.