Tracking the Time Course of Meaning Activation

Publisher Summary This chapter reports two experiments in the application of event related potentials (ERPs) to the problem of lexical ambiguity resolution. The first is similar to ambiguity studies in using naming latency as the dependent measure. The primary purpose of the first experiment explained in the chapter is to insure that the stimulus materials constructed for this study would produce the expected priming effects for both contextually appropriate and inappropriate semantic associates of ambiguous words relative to unrelated target words. In the second experiment, ERPs were recorded to these same stimuli. The fact that ambiguous words have a single physical representation but two or more semantic representations makes them a useful tool for examining the balance between data-driven and concept-driven processes in word recognition.The phoneme monitoring paradigm relies on the assumption that accessing multiple meanings of a word drains more cognitive resources than accessing one meaning. Reaction times in the secondary task of phoneme monitoring are thus used as an index of the number of meanings that were accessed for a given word.