انگیختگی ادراکی ایجاد حافظه های جدید اپیزودیک را بهبود می بخشد

Prior research suggests that the language processor initially activates an underspecified representation of a metonym consistent with all its senses, potentially selecting a specific sense if supported by contextual and lexical information. We explored whether a structural heuristic, the Subject as Agent Principle, which provisionally assigns an agent theta role to canonical subjects, would prompt immediate sense selection. In Experiment 1, we found initial evidence that this principle is active during offline and online processing of metonymic names like Kafka. Reading time results from Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that previous context biasing towards the metonymic sense of the name reduced, but did not remove, the agent preference, consistent with Frazier’s (1999) proposal that the processor may avoid selecting a specific sense, unless grammatically required.

Interpreting polysemes requires that the language processor integrates sentential information with lexical and semantic knowledge to choose one sense of a word from among many, possibly dozens of, related senses (Zipf, 1945). For example, it must be able to entertain the possibility that the word Vietnam may refer to a country, a war, a group of people, a government, a United Nations delegation, or a soccer team, and then utilize some salient piece of information to select the correct meaning in context ( Cruse, 1986 and Nunberg, 1979). Despite the availability of multiple related senses for polysemes, the language processor often seems to avoid simply committing to the most frequent sense, in contrast with homonymous words like bank (e.g., Frazier & Rayner, 1990, cf. Duffy et al., 1988 and Swinney, 1979). In this paper, we aim to demonstrate that syntactic position has a powerful and immediate impact on whether a specific interpretation is selected. In particular, we present evidence from three experiments supporting the view that the language processor utilizes information from a default structural heuristic to make immediate sense selection decisions, but delays when faced with weaker contextual information.