Working memory and lexical ambiguity resolution in Cantonese Chinese

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 16; no. 3; p. e0248170
• Main Author: Yip, Michael C W
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 10-03-2021; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Ambiguity; Ambiguity resolution (mathematics); Biology and Life Sciences; Chinese; Chinese languages; Cognitive ability; Hypotheses; Information processing; Information storage; Inhibition (psychology); Language; Memory; Natural language processing; Psychological aspects; Psychological research; Short term memory; Social Sciences; Word (Linguistics); China
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0248170

The present study examined how working memory functions in the underlying mechanism of the lexical disambiguation process (in activation approach or in inhibition approach). We recruited sixty native Cantonese listeners to participate in two experimental tasks: (a) a Cantonese-version reading span task to measure their working memory (WM) capacity and (b) a standard cross-modal priming task to measure the lexical disambiguation time. The results revealed that (1) the underlying mechanism of the disambiguation process seemed favorable for an inhibition approach and (2) the frequency of the individual meanings of the ambiguous words and the numbers of their meanings might interact with the WM capacity during lexical access, particularly for the low-WM span group.