Ambiguity comprehension in the English language

Abstract: This study focuses on the psycholinguistic problems that people may encounter when it comes to ambiguity. The most common words in English are ambiguous. An example is deck, which can both mean the deck of a ship or a deck of cards. To be able to distinguish the meaning of an ambiguous word, people naturally look at the context in which the word appears. So a sentence like ?The farmer filled the pen?, which is ambiguous, will then be easier to understand if the sentence ?The livestock was hungry? is read earlier in the text. But how do we solve these problems if we do not have a context? What is the most natural thing to do when we do not understand an ambiguous word? And is it easier for some people to understand the correct meaning of an ambiguous sentence than others? These are some of the questions I am going to deal with in this study. I will also look at so called garden path sentences, sentences that lead us to interpret a sentence in one way when starting to read it, and another when it is finished. For example ?Without her donations failed to appear?. Here the ?her? triggers our minds into seeing the possessive form due to the following word ?donations?. But a disambiguated version with just a change of pronoun could be, for example, ?Without him donations failed to appear?. When studying these garden path sentences using eye-tracking, I will be able to show where and what it is in a sentence that makes us understand the words differently. This study focuses on ambiguity in psycholinguistics, and an eye-tracking test has been performed on two groups of people. The aim was to be able to locate the exact millisecond the humans mind finds out the correct meaning of the ambiguous word. The test and how it was done will be explained later. My hypothesis is that people who have a better education in English will be a lot faster in revealing the correct reading of an ambiguous sentence than people who have a lower education, since English has more ambiguous words than Swedish. This study is the complete version and follow-up of my previous study about testing this experiment.