Context & Ambiguity in Language Comprehension

Context drastically speeds comprehension (Word Superiority Effect).
Surrounding information constrains possible meanings, allowing rapid disambiguation.

Readers often miss ambiguities because context "collapses" multiple meanings into the one that fits.
Example: identical letter string in “Jack and Jill…” vs. “The pole vault…” interpreted as hill vs. event because of sentence context.

Tasks:
- Judge relatedness of two spoken sentences (ensures semantic processing).
- Press a key upon hearing target phoneme /k/ (subsidiary reaction-time task).
Critical sentence pair: “…government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of his room.”
“Bugs” evokes two concepts: \text{insect} vs. \text{spy device}.
Result: Slower phoneme detection when “bugs” was ambiguous vs. when replaced by an unambiguous word (e.g., “insects”).
- Indicates extra time spent resolving activated meanings.

While hearing the ambiguous word, a screen briefly showed one of three strings: \text{ant} (insect-related), \text{spy} (device-related), \text{so} (unrelated).
Two display timings:
1. Immediate (synchronous with “bugs”).
2. Delayed (\approx four syllables later).
Immediate results: RT(\text{ant}) \approx RT(\text{spy}) \approx RT(\text{so}) after context exposure.
- This indicates that both meanings (contextually appropriate and inappropriate) were initially activated.
Delayed results: RT(\text{ant}) was significantly faster than RT(\text{spy}).
- This shows that after a brief delay, the contextually irrelevant meaning (spy device) was suppressed, and only the contextually appropriate meaning (insect) remained active.

Ambiguous words briefly activate all contextually plausible meanings.
Clarifying context suppresses the irrelevant meaning within a few syllables.
Reaction-time methods reveal hidden processing costs even when ambiguity feels unnoticed.
Context functions as a rapid, ongoing constraint mechanism in comprehension.