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Abstract:
Abstract: Miyake et al. (1994) suggest that activation of
relevant information is the mechanism underlying working memory in
language processing whereas Gernsbacher and Faust (1991) claim it
is the inhibition of irrelevant information. This issue was
investigated by measuring ERPs and reaction times during the
presentation of German compounds consisting of two nouns with the
first being ambiguous (i.e. 'Ballkleid'/ 'ball' or 'evening
dress'). High and low span subjects heard these compounds in a
cross modal lexical priming task where the target words were
related to one of the two meanings of the ambiguous word. In four
experiments the targets were presented visually at four different
positions of the auditory stimulus: *150 ms before the end of the
ambiguous noun *between first and second noun *at the end of the
compound *400 ms after the end of the compound Priming effects were
found for high spans at all presentation points. Low spans showed
priming effects at all positions except position 1. Only at
position 2 an N400 for both groups was found. The RT results
indicate, that the activation of lexical entries in the mental
lexicon was faster for the high spans and lasted up to 400 ms after
offset of the compound for both groups. ERP results indicate that
after disambiguation the irrelevant meaning of the ambiguous word
was no longer active in the working memory.
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