Effect of Global Context on Homophone Ambiguity Resolution

Effects of context are pervasive throughout perceptual and cognitive processing domains. Many studies have shown context effects in language processing, but these studies have mostly focused on local, linguistic contexts. As a step toward situating language processing in the broad scope of cognitive processing, we investigated the effect of a global, nonlinguistic context on homophone ambiguity resolution. The context was implicitly induced by using only highly imageable target words. This context was predicted to shift attention away from non-imageable meanings, thus reducing activation of non-imageable meanings and consequently reducing ambiguity between meanings. We tracked eye movements as subjects heard spoken words and selected a matching picture from four displayed items. Results were consistent with the predictions: response times were faster for homophones with only one contextually appropriate meaning than homophones with two contextually appropriate meanings (reflecting reduced ambiguity) and participants were less likely to fixate semantic associates of contextually inappropriate meanings than contextually appropriate meanings (reflecting reduced activation of non-imageable meanings). These results suggest that global, non-linguistic contexts influence language processing by shifting attention away from contextually inappropriate meanings.