Perceptual representation as a mechanism of lexical ambiguity resolution: An investigation of span and processing time. |
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Authors: | Madden, Carol J. Zwaan, Rolf A. |
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Abstract: | In 2 experiments, the authors investigated the ability of high- and low-span comprehenders to construe subtle shades of meaning through perceptual representation. High- and low-span comprehenders responded to pictures that either matched or mismatched a target object's shape as implied by the preceding sentence context. At 750 ms after hearing the sentence describing the target object, both high- and low-span comprehenders had activated a contextually appropriate perceptual representation of the target object. However, only high-span comprehenders had perceptually represented the contextually appropriate meaning immediately upon hearing the sentence, whereas low-span comprehenders required more processing time before the perceptual representation was activated. The results are interpreted in a framework of co-occurring lexical representations and perceptual-motor representations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
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Keywords: | perceptual representations lexical ambiguity individual differences span comprehenders processing time language comprehension sentences |
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