Resisting Contextual Information: You Can't Put a Salient Meaning Down

• Authors: Orna Peleg , Rachel Giora , Ofer Fein
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Two experiments support the graded salience hypothesis (Giora 1997, 1999, 2003; Peleg et al. 2001, 2004), which assumes that early processing involves distinct mechanisms-linguistic and contextual-that do not interact but run parallel. While contextual processes make up an integrative, top-down mechanism that benefits from linguistic and extra-linguistic information, the linguistic mechanism is modular (Fodor 1983). Using Vu et al.'s (2000) materials, Experiment 1 shows that the sentential position of a target word (initial vs. final) is crucial for the operation of the global, predictive mechanism, whose effects, accumulated in prior discourse, mask lexical effects in final, but not in initial position. Experiment 2 shows that even in a sentential position that favors contextual effects (i.e. sentence final position, see Peleg et al. 2001, 2004), lexical access is not affected: Salient meanings are activated upon encounter of the lexical stimulus, regardless of contextual information to the contrary. Taken together, these findings argue against direct access models, which suggest that context can selectively activate the appropriate meaning, regardless of salience (see Vu and Paul 1998; Vu et al. 2000).

Keywords

EN

Graded salience hypothesis; sentential position; context effects; predictive context; ambiguity resolution

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 13-44

Dates

published

2008-01-01

online

2008-08-06

Contributors

author

Orna Peleg

• University of Haifa

author

Rachel Giora

• Tel Aviv University

author

Ofer Fein

• The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-008-0008-0