An Experimental Study On The Disambiguity Of Ambiguous Chinese Sentence

Ambiguity is one of the prevalent language phenomenons in natural languages. Ambiguous sentence refers that the same surface level structure corresponds to two or more kinds of deeper level meanings. The research on the ambiguous sentence has increasingly become an important area of sentence understanding researches because it will help to understand the general mechanism of human language processing system. Through the eye-tracking technique,this stuy exames the disambiguity of ambiguous Chinese sentence with the same shape and structure respectively in the neuter sentence context and in the biased sentence context. The results show that:(1)Both in the neuter sentence context and the biased sentence context, the two deeper meanings of an ambiguous Chinese sentence are activated in its earlier processing course, and the relative meaning-frequency of the ambiguous Chinese sentence takes a role in the processing course of the sentence, and the subordinate meaning of the ambiguous sentence is processed more slowly than the dominant meaning of the ambiguous sentence.(2) The role of disambiguity context information is not showed in the early processing course of the ambiguous sentence, but in its late processing course. And in the neuter sentence context, the use of the disambiguity context information is to pick out a siuted meaning from the activated meanings of an ambiguous sentence and to integrate its own inner meaning with this suited meaning. But in the biased sentence coontext, the use of the disambiguity context information is to fit its inner sematic information with one of meanings of the ambiguous sentence.(3)There is a different processing time course between an ambiguous Chinese sentence and its corresponding controlled sentence, which is that the time course of the former is slower than the one of the latter.(4)A11of the results suggest surport the Concurrent Model.