Concluding remarks

To sum up, since the frontal negativity effect did not show on all participants initially but exhibited in the split-group analysis, the present study could only make a preliminary inference that substantial inter-individual variation within lexical ambiguity resolution across the subjects in Chinese homographs. Such an individual difference might reflect on those who with higher reading abilities, who are more capable of recruiting additional

meaning selection. Based on the preliminary findings that a sustained frontal negativity was still involved in when the syntactic cues were biased toward subordinate meaning of homographs in split-group analysis, it is supposed that syntactic context information alone is insufficient to resolve ambiguity effect in Chinese. In particular, the frontal negativity reveals that a top-down executive mechanism will mediate automatically to aid selecting a contextually appropriate meaning of the ambiguous word and inhibit the inappropriate but dominant meaning. Moreover, the meaning dominance probably plays a large role to enhance the meaning activation, especially on dominant meaning of the homographs, which can be easily picked up without extra loads of meaning selection relative to subordinate meaning of homographs.

Taken together, the present study provides a cross-linguistic evidence and a different perspective to probe into lexical ambiguity resolution in Chinese words. Although Chinese is a language in which context plays a crucial role in meaning interpretation, different types of contexts may function distinctively. It is still less clear that syntactic context information alone is enough to resolve the lexical ambiguity in Chinese due to the different result from overall and spilt-group data. The results are only partly consistent with the view that in isolated visual word recognition, the semantic information is crucial, but the syntactic-category information is not, at least in Chinese. Beside, we found that variation between individuals may explain the inconsistency in results with respect to the ambiguity effect across experiments. Such findings highlight the need to take individual cognitive profiles into account when investigating language ambiguity resolution. Most importantly, the study offers an approach to explore the issue as well as provides a comparison for the future analysis.

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Appendixes

A. Ratings scores of each Experimental list