La activación del significado adecuado: un estudio experimental sobre palabras ambiguas en contexto

The aim of this article is to offer a revision of the processing of the synchronic polysemous and homonymous words within a context. According to Swinney’s results (1979), when an ambiguous word is processed all its meanings are always activated. Nonetheless, the difference between types of ambiguity was not considered. The experiment here presented consisted of a reading task with priming. It was carried out by 24 participants and measured using an eye-tracker device. The current results indicate that there is a differential behaviour depending on the type of ambiguity and that Swinney’s proposal is consistent with polysemous words but not with homonymous units.