Chapter 6 General Discussion
6.4 Future research
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6.4 Future Research
First of all, in order to further investigate how the context affects the activation of both dominant and subordinate meanings, additional neutral contexts would be needed, so as to further provide strong evidence to support the context reordering.
Then, in terms of the experimental stimuli, we did not use meaning-frequency matched unambiguous words because Chinese homographs are basically low-frequency words. If the homographs with relatively higher frequency can be utilized, it may provide more direct evidence to examine the frequency account. More specifically, if the access is selective, processing of a biased homograph in a context that supports the subordinate interpretation should be similar to processing of an unambiguous word matched the subordinate meaning frequency.
On the other hand, another issue is the relationship between syntactic-category information and semantic ambiguity resolution. Most research of lexical ambiguity resolution have used ambiguous nouns or verbs as the target words, but the homograph with syntactic category ambiguity, such as 過節 which bears two meanings with different word class: “celebrate the day” or “enmities” is another interesting issue for further research. Whether the syntactic category information can facilitate ambiguity resolution and the subordinate bias effect is eliminated by the syntactically legal continuation of the sentential context can provide theoretical
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explanations for the interplay of syntactic and semantic processing.
Moreover, one of the advantages of using visual world paradigm lies in its simple and natural task. The unconstrained nature of free viewing of picture displays and listening are particularly suited for studies with young children or some special populations, such as, individuals with specific language impairment, with mild Alzheimer’s disease or with autism. The issue of ambiguous words’ processing can also be applied to examine the developmental differences on how context influences homonym processing as children acquire more knowledge of lexical meaning at different ages. Booth, Harasaki, and Burman (2006) investigated both lexical and sentence level context effects by asking children (9-, 10- and 12-year-olds) to read aloud written sentences that biased either the dominant or subordinate meaning of a sentence-final homonym or that were ambiguous. The results showed a lexical level facilitation for dominant and subordinate meanings regardless of biasing context for younger children or lower skill readers. In contrast, no lexical level, but a reliable sentence level facilitation was found for targets consistent with the sentence context for older children or high skill readers. It seems that the older or higher skill readers are better to use sentential context to facilitate the contextually-appropriate meaning of homonymy than younger or lower skill readers. Numerous studies with adults have shown processing differences between unbalanced and balanced homonyms. The
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factor of meaning dominance could be examined in age differences in future developmental studies.
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A. Examples of questionnaire in Norming study two: Meaning Relatedness Task