Effects of contextual facilitation and inhibitory reaction in lexical ambiguity resolution for the Han and Uyghur nationalities

doi:10.3724/SPJ.1041.2021.00746

Abstract

Abstract:

Lexical ambiguity is a common phenomenon in language. In Chinese, there are many kinds of ambiguous words, which is one of the important reasons that ethnic minority students have difficulty in learning Chinese. Two experiments were conducted to investigate the contextual facilitation and context-inhibiting effects of Uygur and Han Chinese college students on the resolution of Chinese ambiguous words. The results showed that the contextual facilitation effect appeared in both nationalities, but the contextual facilitation effect of Han nationality students was significantly greater than that of Uygur nationality students under the condition of short-term processing; there is no significant difference in the contextual facilitation effect between the two nationalities under the condition of long-term processing. Under the condition of short-time processing, only Han nationality students can effectively restrain the interference of irrelevant information, and under the condition of long-time processing, students of both nationalities can effectively restrain the interference of irrelevant information. The whole study shows that with the increase of processing time, Uygur college Students’ contextual facilitation effect and inhibition of irrelevant information can reach the same level as Han college students.

Key words: the Uyghur nationality, lexical ambiguity resolution, contextual facilitation, reaction inhibitor

YANG Qun, ZHANG Jijia, FAN Conghui. (2021). Effects of contextual facilitation and inhibitory reaction in lexical ambiguity resolution for the Han and Uyghur nationalities. Acta Psychologica Sinica, 53(7), 746-757.

Figures/Tables 6

References 39

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Sentence Type	Sentences	Target word
Biased ambiguity (main meaning)	Xiao Wang got to the bottom of things.	A clue
Biased ambiguity (secondary meaning)	Lin Daiyu had such a pretty face.	Looks
Neutrality (main meaning)	It’s hard to tell.	A clue
Neutrality (secondary meaning)	It’s hard to tell.	Looks

Sentence Type	Sentences	Target word
Biased ambiguity (main meaning)	Xiao Wang got to the bottom of things.	A clue
Biased ambiguity (secondary meaning)	Lin Daiyu had such a pretty face.	Looks
Neutrality (main meaning)	It’s hard to tell.	A clue
Neutrality (secondary meaning)	It’s hard to tell.	Looks

Sentence Type	Sentences	Target word
Ambiguous word (main meaning)	Xiao Wang got to the bottom of things.	Looks
Non-ambiguous word (main meaning)	Xiao Wang got to the bottom of the matter.	Looks
Ambiguous word (secondary meaning)	Lin Daiyu had such a pretty face.	A clue
A non-ambiguous word (secondary meaning)	Lin Daiyu looked comely.	A clue

Sentence Type	Sentences	Target word
Ambiguous word (main meaning)	Xiao Wang got to the bottom of things.	Looks
Non-ambiguous word (main meaning)	Xiao Wang got to the bottom of the matter.	Looks
Ambiguous word (secondary meaning)	Lin Daiyu had such a pretty face.	A clue
A non-ambiguous word (secondary meaning)	Lin Daiyu looked comely.	A clue

Nationality	Ambiguous sentence		Nonambiguous sentence
Nationality	Main significance	Secondary significance	Main significance	Secondary significance
Han	827 (162)	874 (184)	734 (156)	760 (171)
Uyghurs	916 (184)	963 (228)	865 (192)	882 (197)