Semantic Access to Ambiguous Word Roots Cannot Be Stopped by Affixation-Not Even in Sentence Contexts: Evidence From Eye-Tracking and the Maze Task

How does the language comprehension system identify and interpret word constituents-or morphemes-during sentence reading? We investigated this question by employing words containing semantically ambiguous roots (e.g., bark, with meanings related to both "dog" and "tree") which are disambiguated when affixed by -ing (e.g., barking; related to "dog" only). We aimed to understand whether higher-level access to the meaning of the root bark would be constrained by lower-level morphological affixation. In Experiment 1, using eye-tracking, participants read sentences containing words with semantically ambiguous roots, such as barking (a prime), combined with targets that were either related to two meanings of the root (dog, tree) or they were cloze and unrelated controls. All five eye-tracking measures we employed (first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past time, total reading time, and regressions to target) showed no difference between the two root-related targets, which were slower than cloze, but faster than unrelated. Results show that even in cases where a meaning is inconsistent with the full word form (barking-tree), both meanings of the ambiguous root are activated. These results were supported by Experiment 2, employing a maze task in which the time to select the cloze (night) continuation for the sentence He heard loud barking during the & mldr; was disrupted by the presence of distractors related to both meanings of bark. We discuss the implications of these findings for the nature of morphological parsing and lexical ambiguity resolution in sentence contexts. We suggest that word recognition and lexical access processes involve separating roots from affixes, yielding independent and exhaustive access to root meanings-even when they are ruled out by affixation and context.