1979/Swinney

==Ideas==
; wikipedia: David Swinney #Selected Research 
This study utilized a CMPT, in order to investigate the process by which people resolve lexical ambiguity. Specifically, do people access all meanings of words at such moments, or only one meaning? Subjects listened to pre-recorded series of sentences that contained ambiguous words. These words were equibiased—meaning that there were 2 possible meanings of each ambiguous word and that one meaning was not favored over the other in common speech. The subjects were informed that they would be tested on their comprehension of these sentences. 
For example, subjects were presented with the utterance: “Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room.” Here, the word “bugs” was determined to be ambiguous and equibiased towards the meaning of either “insects” on one hand, or “surveillance” on the other. At the moment of the utterance “… bugs” either “ANT” or “SPY” or an unrelated word such as “SEW” or non-word, were flashed on the screen. Study participants were asked to decide, as quickly as possible, whether the string of letters was a word or not.
Additionally, context conditions varied in that some had no biasing context, as above, or they strongly biased the listener towards one meaning or another. For example, “Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches and other bugs in the corner of the room.” 
Swinney claimed that if a person activates both meanings of an equibiased ambiguous word simultaneously, then the response times should be the same regardless of which meaning is primed by the stimulus. However, if one meaning or another is activated, then the response time should be quicker for the priming of that meaning.
Results indicated that listeners accessed multiple meanings for ambiguous words, even when faced with strong biasing contexts that indicated a single meaning. That is to say that regardless of whether “The man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room” or “The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches and other bugs in the corner of the room” was uttered, both SPY (contextually inappropriate to the second sentence) and ANT (contextually appropriate) appear to have been primed equally, whereas SEW and non-words were not.
; wikipedia: David Swinney #Contributions to the field of psycholinguistics
Cross-Modal Priming Task. The Cross-Modal Priming Task (CMPT), developed by David Swinney, is an online measure used to detect activation of lexical and syntactic information during sentence comprehension. 
Prior to Swinney’s introduction of this methodology, studies of lexical access were largely procured by offline measures, such as a phoneme-monitoring task. In these measures, study participants were asked to respond to a syntactic or lexical ambiguity in a sentence only after the entire sentence had been comprehended. Since Swinney considered the system of resolving ambiguities to be an autonomous, fast and mandatory process, he suggested that the “downstream,” temporal delay between stimulus and response could contaminate results. The CMPT, therefore, was created to probe lexical access in real time. 
During this task, study participants heard recorded sentences containing lexical or syntactic ambiguities while seated in front of a computer screen. At the same moment the ambiguous word or phrase was uttered in the recording, a simultaneous string of letters, either a word or a non-word, is flashed on the computer screen. These words usually reflected one or another meaning of an ambiguous word or phrase or are unrelated control words in the recorded sentence. Study participants were then asked to respond as quickly as possible once the probes were processed. Here, the idea is that multiple meanings are activated at the moment an ambiguity is encountered in a sentence, which primes related concepts. Swinney’s theory followed that once these related concepts are primed, recognition of them in this task will be quicker than words that are not activated.
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