Seeing clearly: Frame Semantic, Psycholinguistic, and Cross ...

CHAPTER 4. PSYCHOLINGUISTIC EXPERIMENTS 135
example, one pair of sentences referred to a government building containing bugs, probed
with either spy or ant; the context could either be carefully ambiguous or deliberately
biased (. . . spiders, roaches, and other bugs. . . ). Ambiguous sentences alternated with un-
ambiguous controls, e.g. ones in which bugs was replaced with insects. When the probe
was immediate, Swinney found that both senses of the ambiguous noun were primed even
if the context was strongly biased toward one or the other of the readings. When the probe
was presented three syllables later, however, only the contextually appropriate sense was
primed. These results suggest that the lexical access process is not guided by contextual
information, but retrieves all of the senses of ambiguous items. However, contextual infor-
mation is used very soon thereafter to select the appropriate sense from those that have
been retrieved.
Seidenberg et al. (1982) conducted a methodical series of ve experiments on two
types of homonyms, both noun-noun (e.g. ball dance/baseball) and noun-verb (a tire/to
tire), using auditory primes. In each case the last word of the auditory prime was either a
homonym or a control word. A visual probe consisting of a single word was presented either
zero milliseconds or 200 milliseconds after the end of the auditory prime. For example given
the noun-noun homonym spade, the following four sentences were used as primes:
(1) a. You should have played the spade.
b. You should have played the part.
c. Go to the store and buy a spade.
d. Go to the store and buy a belt.
If the following probe is the word card, Ex. (1-a) is congruent with it, using spade. Ex. (1-b)
is congruent using a control word, Ex. (1-c), using the homonym, is incongruent with the
probe, and Ex. (1-d) is also incongruent, using a control word.
Over the course of the ve experiments, Seidenberg et al. carefully varied the
extent to which the context selected for one of the senses, either syntactically, semantically,
or pragmatically. Consistent di erences between the e ects of probing at zero milliseconds
and at 200 milliseconds demonstrated that lexical access per se was not in uenced by
context but that all the senses of the ambiguous words were retrieved \instantaneously"
and then a rapid selection process based on the context occurred. Apparentcounterexamples
seem to the result of lexical priming caused by earlier words within the prime (The auto