Lexical Processing during Sentence Comprehension: Effects of Higher Order Constraints and Implications for Representation

Publisher Summary A fundamental problem in language comprehension is to obtain an accurate characterization of lexical processing and of the influence of contextual information upon that processing. This chapter examines evidence concerning the effects of so-called “higher-order” constraints upon the various stages of lexical processing and outlines a model of the representation and processing of lexical material during sentence comprehension. The conclusions that will result from this examination derive from a particular point of view about the general nature of cognitive processing and mental representation. Thus, some preliminary discussion of this view is important. In order to make meaningful (and testable) statements about the nature of representation in language, and to evaluate the relative role of the various representational facts that have been garnered from theoretical linguistics and experimental psycholinguistics, the assumptions about the processes operating on those representations must be detailed. This position is certainly not novel to psycholinguistic inquiry. However, it appears to be overlooked far too often. The meanings of lexical ambiguities can be differentiated rather easily, and thus the selective effects of higher order contextual constraints upon the functional activation of these meanings are relatively available to empirical examination. Further, not only are lexical ambiguities arguably as common as unambiguous words in language use, but nearly all words exhibit some type of indeterminacy in characterizations of their meanings anyway. Thus, ambiguous words provide a useful and well founded vehicle for examining the effects of context upon lexical processing. Given a sufficiently sensitive task, one should be able to determine whether strongly predictive (higher order) contexts constrain the various stages of lexical processing by examining which meanings of the ambiguities are functional in the presence of these contexts.