Meaning Inhibition and Sentence Processing in Chinese.

Abstract

The present study examined the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence processing, using a standard cross-modal naming experiment with an innovative design and materials construction. Results confirmed that (1) preceding sentence context has exerted an early effect on disambiguating among different alternative meanings of the homophones; (2) the contextually inappropriate meanings of the ambiguous word were inhibited rapidly during sentence processing; and (3) the present results also demonstrated that the inhibitory mechanism could be sustained to a longer duration following the occurrence of the ambiguous word (homophone). Finally, all these results clearly revealed the dynamics of interaction of context effects and spoken word recognition processes.