Spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones: a further investigation

A cross-modal naming experiment was conducted to examine the effects of context and other lexical information in the processing of Chinese homophones during spoken language comprehension. In this experiment, listeners named aloud a visual probe as fast as they could, at a pre-designated point upon hearing the sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results further support that prior context has an early effect on the disambiguation of various homophonic meanings, shortly after the acoustic onset of the word. Second, context interacts with frequency of the individual meanings of a homophone during lexical access. Finally, the present results pattern is clearly consistent with the context-dependency hypothesis that selection of the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word depends on the simultaneous interaction of both sentential and lexical information during lexical access.