Journal of Semantics Advance Access originally published online on June 30, 2008
Journal of Semantics 2008 25(4):381-409; doi:10.1093/jos/ffn004
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Concept Narrowing: The Role of Context-independent Information
Princeton University
Correspondence: PAULA RUBIO-FERNÁNDEZ, Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Green Hall, Princeton NJ 08540, USA, e-mail: paularubio{at}hotmail.com
 |
Abstract |
|---|
The present study aims to investigate the extent to which the process of lexical interpretation is context dependent. It has been uncontroversially agreed in psycholinguistics that interpretation is always affected by sentential context. The major debate in lexical processing research has revolved around the question of whether initial semantic activation is context sensitive or rather exhaustive, that is, whether the effect of context occurs before or only after the information associated to a concept has been accessed from the mental lexicon. However, within post-lexical access processes, the question of whether the selection of a word's meaning components is guided exclusively by contextual relevance, or whether certain meaning components might be selected context independently, has not been such an important focus of research. I have investigated this question in the two experiments reported in this paper and, moreover, have analysed the role that context-independent information in concepts might play in word interpretation. This analysis differs from previous studies on lexical processing in that it places experimental work in the context of a theoretical model of lexical pragmatics.
Received for publication 3 August 2006. Revision received 21 January 2008. Accepted for publication 5 May 2008.