Investigating Students’ Lexical Ambiguity Resolution Strategies

Abstract

The present study is concerned with presenting the different forms of lexical ambiguity and exploring the strategies to solve such ambiguities among Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University students. Polysemy was hypothesised to be the most troublesome form of lexical ambiguity for students, it was also hypothesised that if students are aware of ambiguity resolution strategies, namely, part-of-speech tagging, theme, rheme, neighbouring words, cohesion, and selection restriction, they are more likely to succeed at disambiguating the meaning of words.To test these two hypotheses, two research tools have been adopted. A test has been distributed to 101 second-year students in the department of English at Mohammed Seddik Ben Yahia University of Jijel. Besides, an interview was conducted with the same sample of students for the purpose of identifying their use of resolution strategies