Context effects in lexical access: A meta-analysis

Abstract

The modularity hypothesis was evaluated in this review of 25 studies that investigated context effects in early lexical processing. Selection criteria restricted the review to priming studies and to studies that presented the target word before or at the end of the prime word. Meta-analysis was used to provide summary information about the 17 studies in the review for which effect sizes could be calculated. Overall, the analysis revealed a small effect of context on lexical access. Results provide a disconfirmation of the modularity hypothesis; although multiple interpretations of a word were sometimes accessed, the contextually appropriate interpretation was consistently more strongly activated. The lack of significant heterogeneity of variance suggests that the variability observed across studies was due to sampling error; however, task, timing of target presentation, meaning frequency, type of target, and type of context were identified as potential moderator variables.

The basal ganglia circuits, dopamine, and ambiguous word processing: A neurobiological account of priming studies in Parkinson's disease

“…Whereas there is still considerable evidence of multiple meaning activation under certain conditions, the original conception of autonomous exhaustive access has been superseded by the view that the relative activation levels of different meanings may be modulated as a function of meaning frequency and the strength and nature of the context (Simpson, 1994). A meta-analysis of 25 studies of ambiguity resolution (Lucas, 1999) found that task, timing of target presentation, meaning frequency, type of target, and type of context all acted as potential moderator variables during ambiguity processing.…”

When zebras become painted donkeys: Grammatical gender and semantic priming interact during picture integration in a spoken Spanish sentence

“…Several studies have analysed both semantic (e.g., Duffy, Henderson, & Morris, 1989;O'Seaghdha, 1989O'Seaghdha, , 1997Simpson, Peterson, Casteel, & Burgess, 1989;Williams, 1988) and syntactic (e.g., West & Stanovich, 1986) level context effects, generally concluding that syntactic primes lead mainly to inhibition but no facilitation, because they affect processes that occur after word access, whereas semantic priming is mainly facilitative, caused by lexical level word associations-e.g., dog primes cat, because they are associated words in the lexicon or co-occur frequently in the language (see Lucas, 1999;O'Seaghdha, 1997). In agreement with these studies, gender priming that leads to inhibitory syntactic effects has been reported in Italian using auditory gender monitoring (also called gender classification; Bates et al, 1996) and in German using visual lexical decision (Friederici & Schriefers, 1994;Schriefers, Friederici, & Rose, 1998) and cross-modal visual word naming (Friederici, Garrett, & Jacobsen, 1999 for an overview of the effects of gender in comprehension and production tasks; Jacobsen, 1999; see Schriefers & Jescheniak, 1999).…”

Dominance and context effects on activation of alternative homophone meanings

“…In fact, a large number of experimental studies have demonstrated that sentence context influences the timing and/or degree to which the alternative meanings are activated (e.g., Dopkins, Morris, & Rayner, 1992;Lucas, 1999;Sereno, Brewer, & O'Donnell, 2003;Tabossi, 1988). However, the relative frequency of the alternative meanings is also clearly important.…”