Three naming experiments were conducted to examine the effect of meaning relatedness on lexical ambiguity resolution as well as, the effects of unique or shared feature probes on the pattern of facilitation. Additionally, the research examined the qualifying role of semantic bias on the outcome. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of meaning relatedness on lexical ambiguity resolution. Using strong biasing contexts, selective activation was found for ambiguous words with unrelated meanings, however, multiple activation was found for ambiguous words whose meanings were related. Experiment 2 was conducted to examine the possibility of sentence bias selectively activating unique features of one meaning of a related meaning ambiguity. Strong dominantly and subordinately biasing contexts were written to emphasize a unique aspect of meaning for a related meaning ambiguity. Subsequently, the probe words to be named represented the unique aspect biased by the context. The results demonstrated facilitation for only the contextually appropriate probe relative to an unrelated probe word. Lastly, Experiment 3 examined the pattern of activation for probe words representing a shared feature of the two meanings of a related meaning ambiguity. The same sentence contexts as Experiment 2 were used, however the probe words represented a feature of both the dominant and subordinate meanings. The results showed probe words representing features of both meanings were activated following both dominantly and subordinately biased contexts. The results from all three experiments are interpreted within a dynamical network model that keeps track of the semantic features activated over time and thus, allows for the influence of semantic features in sentence comprehension.
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