Inhibitory processes of Chinese spoken word recognition

The present study was designed to examine the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence comprehension, by using a cross-modal naming experiment. In this experiment, listeners were asked to name aloud a visual probe as fast as they could after hearing a sentence, which ended with a spoken Chinese homophone. Results confirm that preceding sentential context has exerted an early effect on disambiguating among different alternative meanings of the ambiguous word. Secondly, the contextually inappropriate meanings of the ambiguous word would be inhibited rapidly during sentence comprehension. Thirdly, the present results also demonstrated that the inhibitory mechanism could sustain to a longer duration following the occurrence of the ambiguous word.