The present study was designed to further examine the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence processing. In this study, we employed the negative priming paradigm in a cross-modal naming experiment. In the experiment, all the native Cantonese listeners were asked to name aloud a visual probe as quick and accurate as they could after hearing a sentence, which ended with a homophone. Results suggested that preceding sentence context has an early effect on selecting the appropriate meaning among all the other alternative meanings of the homophone. Furthermore, negative priming effects were observed that the contextually inappropriate meanings of the homophone were inhibited rapidly during sentence processing.
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