Parker Adam J, Taylor J S H, Rodd Jennifer M
Department of Experimental Psychology, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London.
Department of Language and Cognition, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2025 Jul;51(7):1157-1177. doi: 10.1037/xlm0001418. Epub 2024 Dec 12.
Fluent reading comprehension demands the rapid access and integration of word meanings. This can be challenging when lexically ambiguous words have less frequent meanings (e.g., the meaning of ). Indeed, readers fixate on lexically ambiguous words that are disambiguated toward their subordinate meaning for longer than matched control words embedded within identical sentence contexts. Word-meaning priming studies have shown that participants flexibly use recent experiences with ambiguous words to guide their interpretation when these words are presented in isolation, even after substantial delays. However, word-meaning priming paradigms have almost always used artificial tasks to measure word-meaning availability and we do not therefore know how priming would support lexical processing when reading for comprehension. Thus, we conducted two eye-movement experiments to examine word-meaning priming during sentence reading. Both experiments employed a 2 (ambiguity: low-ambiguity control vs. high-ambiguity) × 2 (priming: unprimed vs. primed) within-participants design, with either a 1-min delay (Experiment 1; = 28) or a 30-min delay (Experiment 2; = 60) between prime and test sentences. Both experiments showed greater reductions in go-past times and total reading times following priming for high-ambiguity target words than matched low-ambiguity control words, indicating that recent encounters support the processing of word meanings during sentence reading and that this effect extends beyond the simple repetition effect observed for low-ambiguity control words. This illustrates the remarkable flexibility of the human language system in using diverse input to refine stored lexical knowledge even in skilled readers. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).
流畅的阅读理解需要快速获取并整合词义。当词汇歧义词具有较不常见的含义时（例如， 的含义），这可能具有挑战性。事实上，读者注视那些被消除歧义而偏向其从属含义的词汇歧义词的时间，比相同句子语境中匹配的对照词更长。词义启动研究表明，当这些歧义词单独呈现时，即使在很长时间延迟之后，参与者也会灵活地利用最近对歧义词的体验来指导他们的解释。然而，词义启动范式几乎总是使用人工任务来测量词义的可获取性，因此我们不知道在阅读理解阅读时启动如何支持词汇处理。因此，我们进行了两项眼动实验，以研究句子阅读过程中的词义启动。两项实验均采用2（歧义性：低歧义对照与高歧义）×2（启动：未启动与启动）的被试内设计，启动句和测试句之间的延迟分别为1分钟（实验1； = 28）或30分钟（实验2； = 60）。两项实验均表明，与匹配的低歧义对照词相比，高歧义目标词在启动后跳过时间和总阅读时间的减少幅度更大，这表明最近遇到的词支持句子阅读过程中的词义处理，并且这种效应超出了低歧义对照词所观察到的简单重复效应。这说明了人类语言系统在利用各种输入来完善存储的词汇知识方面具有非凡的灵活性，即使对于熟练的读者也是如此。（PsycInfo数据库记录（c）2025美国心理学会，保留所有权利）
