Eye movements while reading biased homographs: Effects of prior encounter and biasing context on reducing the subordinate bias effect

Abstract

Readers experience processing difficulties when reading biased homographs preceded by subordinate-biasing contexts. Attempts to overcome this processing deficit have often failed to reduce the subordinate bias effect (SBE). In the present studies, we examined the processing of biased homographs preceded by single-sentence, subordinate-biasing contexts, and varied whether this preceding context contained a prior instance of the homograph or a control word/phrase. Having previously encountered the homograph earlier in the sentence reduced the SBE for the subsequent encounter, whereas simply instantiating the subordinate meaning produced processing difficulty. We compared these reductions in reading times to differences in processing time between dominant-biased repeated and nonrepeated conditions in order to verify that the reductions observed in the subordinate cases did not simply reflect a general repetition benefit. Our results indicate that a strong, subordinate-biasing context can interact during lexical access to overcome the activation from meaning frequency and reduce the SBE during reading.

Keywords:

• Lexical ambiguity
• Eye movements
• Reading
• Subordinate bias effect
• Context

Portions of these data were presented at the European Conference on Eye Movements, Marseille, France and the AMLAP conference, Paris, France August, 2011; as well as the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting, Seattle, WA November, 2011. The research was supported by Grant HD065829 from the National Institutes of Health. We thank Elizabeth Schotter, Simon Liversedge, Robin Morris, Manuel Perea, and Heather Sheridan for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Notes

¹ The research by Colbert-Getz and Cook (2013) was carried out at the same time, and independently, of our work. We became aware of it after our research was completed.

² First-fixation duration data trended in the same direction as gaze duration; however, in line with other papers in this domain we are not reporting first fixation because the effect is driven by gaze duration, reflecting the probability of refixating the target word.

³ One homograph was removed because our norms revealed that it was not very strongly biased and in fact somewhat polysemous. Consultation of the University of South Florida Free Association Norms (Nelson, McEvoy, & Schreiber, 1998) confirmed the polysemous nature, so we excluded it from the stimuli set for Experiment 2.