Effects of context on the processing of lexical ambiguities

Abstract

The issue of how lexical ambiguities are processed is considered. It is argued that if context or dominance is strong, only a single meaning of an ambiguity is accessed; but that otherwise multiple meanings may be accessed. It is also argued that even with strong context multiple meanings may still be accessed, if the normal act of disambiguation is disrupted by a distraction such as a simultaneously presented lexical decision task.