Distinctive Human Dynamics of Semantic Uncertainty: Contextual Bias Accelerates Lexical Disambiguation

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This study investigated the dynamic resolution of lexical-semantic ambiguity during sentence comprehension, focusing on how uncertainty evolves as contextual information accumulates. Using time-resolved eye-tracking and a novel entropy-based measure derived from group-level semantic choice distributions, we quantified semantic uncertainty at a fine-grained temporal resolution for ambiguous words. By parametrically manipulating the semantic bias strength of the sentence context, we examined how context guides disambiguation over time. The results showed that semantic uncertainty declined gradually over temporal segments and dropped sharply following the onset of ambiguous words, reflecting both incremental integration and syntactic anchoring. A stronger contextual bias led to faster reductions in uncertainty, with effects following a near-linear trend. These findings support dynamic semantic processing models that assume continuous, context-sensitive convergence toward intended meanings. In contrast, a pretrained Chinese BERT model (RoBERTa-wwm-ext) showed similar overall trends in uncertainty reduction but lacked sensitivity to contextual bias. This discrepancy suggests that, while language models can approximate human-level disambiguation broadly, they fail to capture fine-grained semantic modulation driven by context. These findings provide a novel empirical characterization of disambiguation dynamics and offer a new methodological approach to capturing real-time semantic uncertainty. The observed divergence between human and model performance may inform future improvements to language models and contributes to our understanding of possible architectural differences between human and artificial semantic systems.

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