Recall of ambiguous homographs is shaped by context

Abstract

The context surrounding language influences how it is understood and how it is later remembered. Relevant context can include both the physical context and communicative elements. Prior work investigated how physical context could influence the strength of biasing for the interpretation of ambiguous homographs with a preceding cue word (Tullis et al., 2014). They found that when a cue and homograph pair were presented in the same physical context, both cueing and recall were enhanced. Across four experiments, we test if conversational partners and communication goals can act as associative contexts similar to this physical context, and how this context may shape both language production and free recall. Participants viewed a word list and were tasked with writing a sentence that used each word. This was followed by an immediate surprise free recall task. Cues (e.g. wise) preceded ambiguous homographs (e.g. sage) by three words. Homograph interpretation was shaped only by communication partner, such that when speaking to the same person, participants were more likely to interpret the homograph in the way aligned with the cue word (Experiment 2). Additionally, if a word pair was used while speaking with the same person, participants were more likely to recall the word pair sequentially (Experiments 2-4).