Ambiguity in news headlines : a psycholinguistic study

Abstract EN

A news headline is an integral part of the journalistic article.

Some journalists, intentionally or unintentionally, employ ambiguity when constructing news headlines.

Ambiguity could have positive effects on the readers and motivate them to continue reading the news story.

Conversely, it could also lead to misunderstanding and frustration.

The current study is an attempt to identify the types of ambiguity, lexical, syntactic or pragmatic, that encourage the readers to go through the content of headline news story.

For the purpose of this study, 25 ambiguous headlines were set in a two-fold questionnaire that was applied to 100 readers of Al-Ahram Weekly.

The questionnaire investigated the readers' ability to accurately interpret each type of ambiguity.

Also, it explored the psycholinguistic effect of each type of ambiguity on the readers' tendency to continue reading.

The results revealed that the syntactic ambiguity was the most difficult type of ambiguity to be interpreted by the readers, while the pragmatic ambiguity was the easiest.

Moreover, it was noted that the readers were inclined to continue reading the lexically ambiguous headlines more than any other type of ambiguity.

-