Competing Cues in Ambiguous Speech Comprehension: The Role of Visual Competition and Linguistic Context
Successful spoken language comprehension requires listeners to quickly resolve ambiguity, drawing on both context and word-meaning frequency information to correctly comprehend words with multiple meanings. While it is well established that more common meanings are accessed more easily and that strong context supports disambiguation, less is known about how these cues interact, particularly when relevant visual information is available. The present study used an adapted visual-world paradigm to examine how visual context, word-meaning frequency, and semantic context affect disambiguation. Results showed that dominant meanings and prior context improved both speed and accuracy, and that the accuracy advantage for more common meanings was larger when context was delayed. Intriguingly, the presence of relevant distractor images reduced accuracy but did not influence reaction time on correct trials. This “all or nothing” effect suggests that the presence of the relevant distractor hinders the interpretation of the correct meaning, despite context that supports it.
Language comprehension, Lexical ambiguity, Semantic context, Word-meaning frequency, Visual competition, Visual-world paradigm
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