Effects of contextual facilitation and inhibitory reaction in lexical ambiguity resolution for the Han and Uyghur nationalities

Uyghur is a specific alphabetic language that differs from Chinese. Thus, mastering the Chinese ambiguity words, such as homonyms, homonyms, and heteronyms, is challenging for Uyghur students. To understand the correct meaning of ambiguity words, one has to suppress irrelevant meanings according to the context. Chinese is a high-context language, where as Uyghur is a low-context language. Thus, the present study investigates the effect of contextual facilitation for the Uyghur and Han nationalities and compares the differences in the inhibitory effect during lexical ambiguity resolution. This study conducted a semantic decision task to investigate lexical ambiguity resolution in 36Uyghur and 32Han college students. Twenty-five homonymous ambiguity words with dominant and subordinate meanings were selected as final materials. Eight sentences and two target words were formed in two conditions. In the contextual facilitation condition, four sentences were made and ended with the same ambiguity word. Half of the sentences were biased to the subordinate or ordinate meaning, but the others were unbiased to neither meaning. The target words were semantically related to the ordinary or subordinate meaning of the ambiguity word. In this condition, all target words were semantically consistent with the ambiguity word in each sentence. In the inhibitory condition, two sentences were ended with the ambiguity word; one was biased to the ordinary meaning, and the other was biased to the subordinate meaning. The other two sentences without ambiguity were only different from the former two sentences on the last ambiguity word. The target words were the same with the context facilitation condition but were not semantically consistent with the last words. The participants were asked to decide whether the target words were semantically consistent with the ambiguity words. Thus, the right answers in the facilitation condition were all "yes" and the right answers in the inhibitory condition were all "no." The SOA of ambiguity and target words is 200 ms in Experiment 1 and 1000 ms in Experiment 2. Results indicated a contextual facilitation effect in Han and Uyghur students in two SOAs, and the size of the effect for the Han students was significantly bigger than that of the Uyghur students in 200 ms. The inhibitory reaction effect was found in two SOAs for the Han students but only found in 1000 ms for Uyghur students. In lexical ambiguity resolution, the ability to extract the accurate meaning and suppress the irrelevant meaning according to the context is important. According to the context, the Uyghur students could activate accurate and irrelevant meanings in the sentence but could not immediately reject the irrelative meaning. The Uyghur students took a long time to inhibit the improper meaning of the ambiguity words.