Implications of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution for Word Recognition and Comprehension

Publisher Summary The implications of the lexical ambiguity problem go far beyond words with multiple dictionary entries. The issues involved in lexical ambiguity research are applicable to a wide range of comprehension phenomena. The selection processes that typify ambiguous words are, to some extent, relevant to all lexical access because all words normally have more information associated with them than is required in any particular context. Word-level ambiguity only exemplifies in an obvious way, because of characteristics that exist at virtually all levels of language comprehension. It is suggested in the chapter that phenomena such as metaphor, idiom, and indirect requests present a comprehender with essentially the same interpretive dilemma occasioned by words with more than one possible meaning. The chapter reviews briefly some of the recent research in lexical ambiguity and additionally discusses extensions of lexical ambiguity research to other issues of word recognition. It also describes a series of studies using lexical ambiguity to explore qualitative changes that occur with development of the ability to use context in facilitating word recognition, a problem to which the methodology of ambiguity seems very well suited.

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