Lexical ambiguity resolution is the process whereby the inappropriate meaning of ambiguous word was inhibited and the appropriate meaning was selected. There are two views about inhibiting the inappropriate meaning of ambiguous words in sentences comprehension, one is that multiple meanings of ambiguous words is activated firstly, then the inappropriate meaning was eliminated from the working memory (Swinney, 1979; Marson & Just, 2007), another is that the inappropriate meaning was prevented from activating at first (Sereno, 1995). Cognitive styles mean the preference to depend on internal inference or external inference in processing information, individuals tend to depend on internal inference were classified as field dependence, while individuals depend on external inference more were classified as field independence. Previous studies found that the capacity of cognitive reconstruction of field independence is significantly higher than that of field dependence (Witkin & Goodenough, 1981). In order to acquire the correct sentence meaning, it is necessary to reconstruct the sentence representation in the process of the lexical disambiguity in sentence comprehension. However, no study explored the different mechanism of individuals with different cognitive styles in inhibiting the lexical ambiguity.
The aim of this experiment is to explore the different mechanism between field independence and field dependence in inhibiting the inappropriate meaning of ambiguous words and the disambiguity mechanism of ambiguous words. The force-paced moving windows paradigms and semantic congruity judging tasks were employed in our research. The fixed design is 2 (Cognitive Styles: field dependence, field independence) × 2 (ISI: 150ms, 800ms) × 2 (Sentence Type: ambiguous sentence, unambiguous sentence), Cognitive Styles and Sentence Type are between variables, and ISI is within variable.
ANOVA analysis found an three factors interaction among Cognitive Styles, Sentence Type and ISI (F1(1, 56) =4.22，p<0.05；F2(1, 31) =5.03，p<0.05), further analysis showed that a significant main effect of Sentence Type was found for field dependence (F1(1, 28) =45.53，p<0.001；F2(1, 31) =32.75，p<0.001), but no interaction between Sentence Type and ISI was found, which means that there was significantly difference between the ambiguous sentences and unambiguous sentences both at 150ms and at 800ms after ambiguous words for field dependence; for field independence, however, an interaction between Sentence Type and ISI was found (F1(1, 28) =15.00，p<0.01；F2(1, 31) =17.87，p<0.01), at 150ms after ambiguous words, significant difference between ambiguous sentence and unambiguous sentence was found (F1(1, 28)=41.34，p<0.001；F2(1, 31)=36.30，p<0.001), while there was no significant difference between ambiguous sentence and unambiguous sentence at 800ms after ambiguous words. These findings indicated that field independence inhibited the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words at 800ms after the ambiguous words, while field dependence did not inhibit the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words at the same time point (800ms). In a word, field independence inhibited the inappropriate meanings of ambiguous words earlier than field dependence. Meanwhile, the results indicated that the multiple meanings of ambiguous words were activated firstly, then the meaning inconsistent with context was inhibited, which supported the Multiple Access Model
Key words
ambiguous words /
inhibition /
cognitive styles
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Funding
the Difference of Eye Movements while Students Reading Text
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