Abstract: A participant self-paced word-by-word moving window paradigm was used to investigate the fate of inappropriate meanings of Chinese disyllable homophones once their appropriate meanings were selected and enhanced by sentence context. Both balanced and biased homophones were included in the present study. The differences on relative frequencies of alternative meanings are smaller for the balanced homophones than for the biased ones. Forty participants were asked to read a discourse, which was composed of three sentences and coherent in meanings. In repeated condition, a word in the first sentence was homophonic to a word in the third sentence such that a homophone was presented twice. In non-repeated condition, participants read almost the same discourses as those used in repeated condition with only one exception: The homophone on its first presentation in repeated condition was replaced with a non-homophone control word in non-repeated condition. The repeatedness effects were defined by longer reading time of the homophone on its second presentation and/or its continuous regions in repeated condition than that in non-repeated condition. The repeatedness effects were found only for balanced homophones: The reading time for the region just after the homophone on its second presentation was longer in repeated condition than in the non-repeated condition, suggesting that the inappropriate meanings of balanced homophones were inhibited after the appropriate ones had been selected. Neither simple inhibition nor passive decay hypotheses can explain these findings. However, the visual homophone meaning recognition (VHMR) model, which proposed both conflict monitoring and inhibitory control modules, can explain these findings well. In addition, the repeatedness effects were observed only in the participants with faster reading speed, suggesting that it was the efficient inhibition of irrelevant information during reading that promoted the reading speed.

Key words: lexical ambiguity, meaning access, inhibitory processes, discourse comprehension, Chinese