Abstract: Understanding the nature of lexical access for ambiguous words has been the aim of many psycholinguistic studies in the past two decades. The principle issue concerns whether all meanings of an ambiguous word are activated at the same time or ordered and selective access is led by meaning frequency and context. In lexical decision task, Zhang et al. (1999) had found that meaning access of Chinese homographs is mainly affected by the relative frequency of meanings, and referential sentence context had no effect on the access of homograph's subordinate meaning. Using a primed naming task, the present study examined the time course of meaning activation of Chinese syntactic category ambiguous words in isolation In four SOAs (43, 84, 200 and 400ms), subjects named target single character words that were semantic related to the more frequent or less frequent meaning of an ambiguous single character prime. The results showed that two meanings of ambiguous words were both activated, with the dominant meaning retrieved earlier than the subordinate meaning. After initial activation, the less frequent meaning became less active, while the dominant meaning maintained a high level of activation. It was suggested that relative frequency played an important role in the multiple activation process of Chinese syntactic category ambiguous words.

Key words: syntactic category ambiguous words, meaning activation, relative frequency, time course, Chinese