Abstract
The priming technique was used to investigate the conditions under which a homograph’s dominant and/or nondominant semantic sense will be retrieved. Subjects verified whether “A(n) A is a(n) B” when A was an ambiguous word and B was a word corresponding to either a dominant or an unusual semantic sense of word A. When word B most often corresponded to the dominant sense of word A (Experiment I), a Priming by Dominance interaction was obtained in the reaction time (RT) data; viz, the facilitatory effect of priming was greater for the dominant-sense sentences than for the unusual-sense sentences. When the word B equally often corresponded to the dominant and unusual senses of A (Experiment 2), the facilitatory effect of priming was equal for the dominant-sense and unusual-sense sentences. These results were interpreted within the framework of a two-stage model of lexical access (d. Posner & Snyder, 1975; Neely, 1977). An application of this two-stage model to the now rather extensive literature on homographic processing helps clear up the apparent contradictions that have been prevalent in this literature.
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Reference Notes
Jenkins, J. J.Context conditions meaning. Invited address presented at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, 1977.
Swinney, D. A.Does context direct lexical access? Paper presented at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, 1976.
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Yates, J. Priming dominant and unusual senses of ambiguous words. Memory & Cognition 6, 636–643 (1978). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198254
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03198254