Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 General background
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1.1 General background
Human comprehend countless auditory and written sentences in daily life. To successfully understand the meaning of sentences, people need to integrate plenty of information (e.g., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic information, etc.) provided in the sentences. Thus, it arouses the interests of psycholinguists and neuropsychologists in the way information from different sources is integrated in human’s mind and brain.
More specifically, how syntactic and semantic information interact during sentence comprehension is one of the hot issues.
Two distinct classes of sentence processing models have been proposed to account for the interaction between syntactic and semantic information—syntax-first
(garden-path) models and constraint-satisfaction models. The syntax-first (garden-path) models assume that syntactic and semantic information is processed serially (Frazier & Rayner, 1987; Friederici, 2002; Friederici, Hahne, & Mecklinger, 1996; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983). Syntactic-category assignment must precede semantic analysis. In contrast, the constraint-satisfaction models propose that semantic and syntactic information are processed in parallel (Macdonald, 1993;
Macdonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Trueswell & Tanenhaus, 1994;
Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Garnsey, 1994; Trueswell, Tanenhaus, & Kello, 1993).
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Different sources of information are processed and weighed at the same time during sentence comprehension. Previous neurolinguistic research on Indo-European languages (e.g., German and French) mostly supported the syntax-first models (Friederici, 2002; Friederici, Gunter, Hahne, & Mauth, 2004; Friederici et al., 1996;
Friederici, Steinhauer, & Frisch, 1999; Hahne & Friederici, 2002; Isel, Hahne, Maess,
& Friederici, 2007). However, the functional primacy of syntactic category assignment was not obviously found in Chinese studies (Li, 1998; Wang, Mo, Xiang, Xu, & Chen, 2013; Yu & Zhang, 2008; Zhang et al., 2013; Zhang, Yu, & Boland, 2010). The discrepancy might result from the unequal transparency of syntactic information manifested in the Indo-European languages and in Chinese (Zhang et al., 2010). Thus, it is of theoretical significance to investigate the interaction between syntactic and semantic contextual information during Chinese sentence comprehension.
Ambiguity resolution can provide an opportunity to examine these sentence processing models. Most literature is established by investigating how people resolve syntactic ambiguity (e.g., The horse raced past the barn fell.) in sentences.
Nevertheless, whether these sentence processing models can explain the resolution of lexical ambiguity (e.g., bank in English) in sentences should be examined.
Lexical ambiguity is a robust phenomenon of language, in which multiple
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meanings can be expressed through a single linguistic form (either visual or acoustic).
Homographic words can be roughly subdivided into two types, homonymy and polysemy (Lyons, 1977). Homonymy contains multiple meanings which are etymologically or semantically unrelated, such as bank (river bank/financial bank), while polysemy involves multiple senses which are etymologically or semantically related, such as hook (fish hook/cloth hook). Recent psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic studies have demonstrated that homonymy and polysemy are psychological distinct and being processed in different ways (Beretta, Fiorentino, &
Poeppel, 2005; Frazier & Rayner, 1990; Klepousniotou, 2002; Klepousniotou &
Baum, 2007; Klepousniotou, Pike, Steinhauer, & Gracco, 2012; Klepousniotou, Titone, & Romero, 2008; Pickering & Frisson, 2001; Rodd, Gaskell, &
Marslen-Wilson, 2002). Multiple meanings of homonymy are exclusive and stored as different representations, while multiple senses of polysemy are not mutually exclusive and may share a core representation. To avoid lumping all things together, the present study primarily focuses on homonymy, also called homophonic homographs.
Over the past three decades lexical ambiguity resolution has been one of the hot issues in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Researchers have been interested in whether one or multiple meanings are activated when an ambiguous word is
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processed. A lot of studies have shown that meaning dominance (i.e., frequency of use) may influence the activation level of alternative meanings of a homograph. The dominant meaning (i.e., high-frequency meaning) is easier to reach a high activation level than the subordinate meaning (i.e., low-frequency meaning) (Burgess &
Simpson, 1988; Hogaboam & Perfetti, 1975; Simpson, 1981; Simpson & Burgess, 1985). When the alternative meanings are equally frequent, they reach a high activation level simultaneously and compete with each other (Duffy, Morris, &
Rayner, 1988; Rayner & Duffy, 1986; Seidenberg, Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Bienkowski, 1982; S. C. Sereno, Pacht, & Rayner, 1992).
However, the meaning dominance is not the only factor which can influence lexical ambiguity resolution. An increasing number of studies have been concerned with the role of context, especially semantic context, in resolving ambiguous words.
There are two views: one is selective access view, and the other is exhaustive access view. Selective access view assumes that only the context-appropriate meaning is activated (Glucksberg, Kreuz, & Rho, 1986; Schvaneveldt, Meyer, & Becker, 1976;
Simpson, 1981; Simpson & Krueger, 1991; Tabossi, 1988; Tabossi, Colombo, & Job, 1987; Tabossi & Zardon, 1993), while exhaustive access view proposes that multiple meanings are activated initially regardless of contextual bias (Onifer & Swinney, 1981;
Seidenberg et al., 1982; Swaab, Brown, & Hagoort, 2003; Swinney, 1979; Tanenhaus
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& Donnenwerth-Nolan, 1984; Tanenhaus, Leiman, & Seidenberg, 1979). Recent eye movement studies have consistently found a subordinate bias effect (SBE) for biased homographs (i.e., the frequency of alternative meanings is not equal) (Duffy, Kambe,
& Rayner, 2001; Duffy et al., 1988; Pacht & Rayner, 1993; Rayner & Duffy, 1986;
Rayner & Frazier, 1989; Rayner, Pacht, & Duffy, 1994; 盧怡璇, 2012). For example,
Duffy et al. (1988) observed longer fixation durations on biased homographs than on frequency-matched unambiguous words when the preceding context was biased toward the subordinate meaning of the homographs. In order to explain the SBE, the reordered access model (Duffy et al., 2001; Duffy et al., 1988) was proposed to highlight the early impact of semantic context on the activation of multiple meanings.
The subordinate-biased context boosts the activation of the subordinate meaning and leads to the competition between the alternative meanings.
In addition to meaning dominance and context, syntactic category is another factor influencing the processing of ambiguous words. Pickering and Frisson (2001) conducted an eye-movement study to investigate the SBE of biased homographic verbs and found there was no SBE in the target region. Thus, they suggested the resolution of biased homographic verbs is not as fast as that of biased homographic nouns. This study implies the necessity of distinguishing different types of homographs based on syntactic category in investigating lexical ambiguity resolution.
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Nevertheless, there is a lack of experimental data for examining the influence of syntactic context on lexical ambiguity resolution, since most literature on lexical ambiguity resolution has mainly focused on those ambiguous words whose component meanings share a single syntactic category, (i.e., lexical-semantic ambiguity), such as bank. In fact, there are some ambiguous words whose component meanings cross different syntactic categories, called syntactic category ambiguous words (SCA words), such as watch (a clock/to look). Investigation of SCA words can shed light on functional primacy of syntactic constraint from the preceding context.
For example, Folk and Morris (2003) observed an absence of the SBE for SCA words in sentences which are semantically- and syntactically-biased toward the subordinate meaning. The observation was considered the evidence that syntactic category constraint can mediate the semantic ambiguity resolution. This result can fit into the syntax-first models, in which the analysis of syntactic information is assumed to precede the analysis of semantic information. However, an alternative explanation of the absence of the SBE for SCA words is that the inherent difficulty of verb meaning limits the speed of activation and delays the meaning competition. Therefore, the aim of the present study is to systematically investigate the influence of syntactic category and semantic constraints on the resolution of Chinese lexical-semantic and syntactic category ambiguous words. Our ultimate goal is to see whether the syntax-first
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models or the constraint-satisfaction models can explain lexical ambiguity resolution in sentences.