Contextual effects on lexical access of polysemic and homonym words

Abstract

In this text we discuss how polysemous and homonyms words are accessed and what is the role of context during this access. Works by Swinney (1979) and Tanenhaus et al. (1979) support the hypothesis of multiple access, for which the context acts only late in the lexical access of ambiguous words. On the other hand, Tabossi and Zardon (1993) and Simpson (1994) support the hypothesis of selective access, according to which only the sense specified by context is accessed during the reading of an ambiguous word. To check the validity of these assumptions in the access of polysemous and homonyms words, we conducted three experiments of cross-modal priming. The results corroborate the hypothesis of multiple access. Regarding the relationship between polysemy and homonymy, our findings provide evidence for the hypothesis that polysemous and homonyms words are accessed in the same way, even if there are more senses associated with polysemies diachronically.