You might be interested in Gernsbacher's work, its about how more skilled readers rely heavily on context whereas less skilled find dont rely as much on sentence contex and find it difficult to suppress contex irrelevant meanings of ambiguous words. I couldn't find the original reference but here is a related one about the appreciation of puns.
GERNSBACHER, M. A. , & ROBERTSON, R. R. W. (1995). Reading skill and suppression revisited. Psychological Science, 6, 165-169.
Gernsbacher (1993; Psychological Science, 4,294-298) reported that less-skilled readers are less able to quickly suppress irrelevant information (e.g., the contextually inappropriate meaning of a homograph, such as the playing-card meaning of spade, in the sentence, He dug with the spade, or the inappropriate form of a homophone, such as patience, in the sentence, He had lots of patients). In the current research, we investigated a ramification of that finding: If less-skilled readers are less able to suppress a contextually inappropriate meaning of a homograph, perhaps less-skilled readers might be better than more-skilled readers at comprehending puns. However, intuition and previous research suggest against this hypothesis, as do the results of the research presented here. On a task that required accepting, rather than rejecting, a meaning of a homograph that was not implied by a sentence context, more-skilled readers responded more rapidly than less-skilled readers. In contrast, on a task that required accepting a meaning of a homograph that was implied by the sentence context, more- and less-skilled readers performed equally well. We conclude that more-skilled readers are more able to rapidly accept inappropriate meanings of homographs because they are more skilled at suppression (which in this case involves suppressing the appropriate meanings)
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Date: 2005-05-03 06:47 am (UTC)I couldn't find the original reference but here is a related one about the appreciation of puns.
GERNSBACHER, M. A. , & ROBERTSON, R. R. W. (1995). Reading skill and suppression revisited. Psychological Science, 6, 165-169.
Gernsbacher (1993; Psychological Science, 4,294-298) reported that less-skilled readers are less able to quickly suppress irrelevant information (e.g., the contextually inappropriate meaning of a homograph, such as the playing-card meaning of spade, in the sentence, He dug with the spade, or the inappropriate form of a homophone, such as patience, in the sentence, He had lots of patients). In the current research, we investigated a ramification of that finding: If less-skilled readers are less able to suppress a contextually inappropriate meaning of a homograph, perhaps less-skilled readers might be better than more-skilled readers at comprehending puns. However, intuition and previous research suggest against this hypothesis, as do the results of the research presented here. On a task that required accepting, rather than rejecting, a meaning of a homograph that was not implied by a sentence context, more-skilled readers responded more rapidly than less-skilled readers. In contrast, on a task that required accepting a meaning of a homograph that was implied by the sentence context, more- and less-skilled readers performed equally well. We conclude that more-skilled readers are more able to rapidly accept inappropriate meanings of homographs because they are more skilled at suppression (which in this case involves suppressing the appropriate meanings)