한국어 문장 읽기 시 동철동음어 처리: 안구운동 추적연구

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate how lexical ambiguity affectsinformation processing during natural text reading. In this study, Koreanbisyllabic homonyms were used as materials. All homonyms for the experimentunderwent familiarity ratings for individual meanings. Based on these ratings,stimuli were divided into two groups: one with nearly equal familiarity for thetwo meanings (the balanced group) and the other with a noticeable differencein familiarity (the biased group). The sentences used in the experiment wereconstructed in a way that the homonyms can be interpreted in either of thetwo meanings. As a control condition, monosemys starting with the same syllableas each homonym were used, and sentences were designed to maintaincoherence with these monosemys. While participants read a sentence containingeither a homonym (the experimental condition) or a monosemy (the controlcondition) in each trial and respond to a simple question about the sentence,their eye movements were recorded in each trial. The results showed that onlyin the biased group, the ambiguity advantage effect was observed, where gazeduration and total reading time for homonyms were shorter compared to thosefor monosemys. There was no ambiguity advantage effect in the balanced group. This is a different pattern from previous studies in alphabetical languages thatreported the ambiguity disadvantage for homonyms, and it provides importantimplications for research on lexical ambiguity of Korean.