Correspondingly, within this part of the literature, studies of context effects have manipulated the availability of semantic constraints, either from lexically associated words or from sentence message-level meaning. Most of the large body of research on semantic ambiguity resolution has focused on meaning selection within a particular syntactic category (usually nouns) – for example, on how people determine whether the word organ is being used to refer to a musical instrument or a body part. A primary goal of psycholinguistic research is thus to understand how information gleaned from individual lexical items is brought together with that derived from the larger language and communicative context – and, in particular, how different sources of contextual information are processed, both neurally and cognitively, and how they shape the interpretation of individual words. The appropriate interpretation of a word therefore needs to be established via a variety of contextual constraints, including lexical associations among co-occurring words, restrictions set by the syntactic structure, message-level semantic information built as context unfolds, pragmatic factors, world knowledge, and so forth. One central feature of language is that a single spelling or pronunciation is oftentimes associated with multiple senses. Overall, the findings suggest that ambiguity resolution in context involves the interplay between multiple neural networks, some involving more automatic semantic processing mechanisms and others involving top-down control mechanisms. Experiment 2 showed that this reduced N400 facilitation was limited to cases in which the semantic context picks out a nondominant meaning, likely reflecting the semantic mismatch between the context and residual, automatic activation of the contextually-inappropriate dominant sense. Semantic constraints also reduced N400 amplitudes, but less so for homographs than unambiguous words. Semantic constraints eliminated this frontal ambiguity effect. Replicating prior work, when only syntactic information was available NV-homographs elicited sustained frontal negativity relative to unambiguous words. Experiment 1 embedded NV-homographs and matched unambiguous words in contexts that provided only syntactic cues or both syntactic and semantic constraints. Two event-related potential experiments investigated the effects of syntactic and semantic context information on the processing of noun/verb (NV) homographs (e.g., park).
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