Lexical Processing and Sentence Context Effects

Publisher Summary This chapter presents a discussion on lexical processing and sentence context effects during reading. There are various sources of information that are realized within the printed letter string of an individual word that might influence lexical access such as word familiarity, word class, and lexical ambiguity. Word frequency effects have been demonstrated in virtually every standard measure of word recognition, including lexical decision. Lexical familiarity (as assessed by printed word frequency), age of acquisition, or subjective familiarity rating influence a reader's initial processing time on a word as measured by first fixation duration or gaze duration. Readers spend more time on less familiar than on more familiar words of equal length. One way of investigating the role of word meaning in lexical access is to compare reading behavior on words that differ in the degree to which they convey semantic content. Lexically ambiguous words possess multiple meanings associated with a single orthographic form and, as such, they afford unique opportunities to examine the role of word meaning in lexical access. Under this view, given sufficiently constraining context, access may be limited to the context appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word.