Abstract
This study aims to examine the effect of contextual constraint on the processing of polysemous words in Japanese EFL reading. A total of 44 Japanese university students read both strongly and weakly constraining sentences, that is, sentences that contained target polysemous words constrained to subordinate meanings unfamiliar to the participants. After reading each sentence, the students completed a lexical decision task, in which they classified two types of probe words (representing the dominant and subordinate meanings of the target words) as words or nonwords, as quickly as possible. The results showed that degree of contextual constraint influenced lexical decision latency. Specifically, in the weakly constraining sentences, the participants responded to the subordinate meanings of the target words more quickly than to their dominant meanings. In contrast, there were no significant differences in lexical decision latency between the two probe types in the strongly constraining sentences. Taken together, these findings suggest that the role of dominant meanings in the processing of unfamiliar subordinate meanings of polysemous words differs according to the strength of the contextual constraint.
