EYE MOVEMENTS AND LEXICAL AMBIGUITY

Readers' eye movements were recorded as they read sentences containing lexically ambiguous words. With a neutral preceding context, readers fixated longer on ambiguous words with two highly likely meanings than on ambiguous words with a highly dominant interpretation. However, when the disambiguating information was consistent with the non-dominant interpretation, readers had much more difficulty processing the rest of the sentence when the ambiguous word had a highly dominant interpretation than when it did not. With biasing preceding context, the pattern of results suggested that differential fixation times on ambiguous words reflects post-lexical selection and integration processes.