Lexical Ambiguity and Context Effects in Spoken Word Recognition: Evidence from Chinese

Chinese is a language that is extensively ambiguous on a lexical-morphemic level. In this study, we examined the effects of prior context, frequency, and density of a homophone on spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones in a cross-modal experiment. Results indicate that prior context affects the access of the appropriate meaning from early on, and that context interacts with frequency of the individual meanings of a homophone. These results are consistent with the context-dependency hypothesis which argues that ambiguous meanings of a word may be selectively accessed at an early stage of recognition according to sentential context. However, the results do not suggest a pre-selection process in which the contextually appropriate meaning can be activated prior to the perception of the relevant acoustic signal.