please translate this to persian:
When a homograph is encountered in isolation, it is impossible to discern its intended meaning. Luckily, readers usually have the benefit of a sentence context that can give them clues as to which meaning they should interpret. For example, it would be easy to infer that bank means “financial institution” when it is preceded by “John went to deposit some money at the . . .” In contrast, you might be more likely to infer that it means “side of a river” if it were preceded by “John went to sail a boat at the river . . .” In this example, the information that helps distinguish the meaning of bank comes before the word itself. But sometimes the disambiguating information appears after the word. In these situations, readers are less likely to make the correct initial interpretation. Rather, readers tend to make regressions back to the word if they had initially misinterpreted it (e.g., Duffy, Morris, & Rayner, 1988; Rayner & Duffy, 1986).
Difficulty or uncertainty discerning exact word meaning can also arise when word forms are visually very similar, as with orthographic-substitution neighbors (e.g., birch and birth) and transposition-letter neighbors (e.g., calm and clam). The likelihood that the word will be misinterpreted is higher if the correct word is rare and the highly similar word is more common. Context can help readers in such cases; readers have an easier time recognizing the correct word (as opposed to the visually similar word) when the preceding sentence context indicates the correct meaning (Johnson, 2009; Slattery, 2009).
Sentence context also helps readers with words that are neither homographs nor neighbors of another word, indicating that the effect is fairly general. For example, a constraining context, one that makes a particular word predictable, leads to that word’s being fixated less often (i.e., skipped more) and for less time than if it were preceded by a neutral context that could be completed by a wide range of words (Ehrlich & Rayner, 1981; Zola, 1984; see Rayner, 1998, 2009, for reviews). A constraining context also speeds response time in naming (Stanovich & West, 1979, 1981; West & Stanovich, 1982) and lexical decision tasks (Schuberth & Eimas, 1977) and affects the brain’s response to words as measured with ERPs (Kutas & Hillyard, 1984; see Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). The findings about the importance of context in visual word recognition suggest that training courses that teach students not to reread and speed-reading devices that do not allow for going back will make readers more likely to misinterpret words when they occur in less constraining contexts.
Comprehension
Given that reading typically progresses rather smoothly, we may not notice the subtle complexities that are associated with understanding the meaning of a text. We have already mentioned that some words are ambiguous because they have multiple meanings. Sentences also can be ambiguous in that it is not always obvious how each individual word in a given sentence functions and relates to the other words (i.e., the sentence’s syntax). Consider the sentence “While Mary was mending the sock fell off her lap.” When reading a sentence like this, readers often initially misinterpret it (the term for this is getting garden pathed; see Frazier & Rayner, 1982; Rayner, Carlson, & Frazier, 1983). This happens because readers, like listeners, tend to process words incrementally, as soon as they have identified them. They often assume at first that “the sock” is the object of “was mending” (i.e., that what Mary was mending was the sock). Of course, after reading the end of the sentence, it is clear that that interpretation could not possibly be correct (if so, then what fell off her lap?). In reality, the sentence should be interpreted such that “the sock fell off her lap” is a sentence unit (a constituent) and that Mary was mending something that was not stated in the text. When we introduce this idea and these types of sentences to students in the classroom, they often note that ambiguity could be avoided if the writer simply put a comma after “was mending” to disambiguate the sentence by separating the two constituents. One might argue that good copy editors would not let such a sentence occur and that such poorly written sentences should be rare. However, the comma is indeed optional in English grammar and writers (and speakers) are not very good at anticipating whether readers (or listeners) are likely to misinterpret what they write (or say; Ferreira & Schotter, 2013). Therefore, garden-path sentences like this occur much more often than one might imagine (they are quite notorious for occurring in newspaper headlines; e.g., “McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers”: Crash Blossoms Up the Garden Path, 2009).
Further complicating the process of understanding sentences is that words can be ambiguous with respect to their grammatical role—that is, their part of speech. In the garden-path example we have been discussing, the problem in interpreting the sentence is not due to difficulty discerning the meaning of the individual words but rather to difficulty deciding whether Mary was mending the sock or whether the sock fell. Add to that ambiguity the difficulty of deciding whether a word itself means one idea or another and you find yourself in a very difficult situation. For example, consider a sentence that begins, “The desert trains . . .” With only these words, you will not be able to figure out how this phrase should be interpreted until you get more information from the rest of the sentence. Context would help you determine whether those words should be interpreted as a noun and verb (i.e., “The desert trains boys to be men”) or an adjective and a noun (i.e., “The desert trains are hot and dusty”). The information that would help you understand the roles and meanings of “desert trains” occurs after the ambiguous phrase. When you first encounter the words “desert trains,” you must make a best guess as to how to understand them. When your first guess at an interpretation is wrong, then you run into problems. In these situations, readers fix the problem by making regressions and rereading the sentence (or parts thereof) in order to find the correct interpretation (Frazier & Rayner, 1987).
Fixing comprehension failure
The examples we have been discussing show that discourse can sometimes contain syntactic ambiguities and it is only via careful reading that the reader will be able to appreciate the appropriate meaning. Readers are often able to fix comprehension problems by rereading—something that speed-reading training courses discourage and that devices using RSVP may make impossible. In fact, recent research demonstrates this point quite clearly. Schotter, Tran, and Rayner (2014) had people read garden-path sentences (such as the one in Fig. 13) while their eye movements were monitored. The sentences were presented either normally or with a trailing-mask manipulation, in which each letter in a word was replaced with an x after the reader’s eyes moved past it. This manipulation ensured that readers had only one encounter with the word—if they returned to reread it, they would be looking at a string of x’s. Schotter and colleagues found that readers could accurately respond to a two-alternative comprehension question about the sentence much better when they were able to reread words (i.e., when they made a regression in the normal reading condition: 75% accuracy) than when they could not (i.e., when they made a regression in the trailing-mask condition: around 50% accuracy—chance performance). These findings suggest that having only one encounter with the words in the sentence might not be sufficient for successful understanding of the text.