Sentence production with homonymous and polysemous words

Forty subjects produced sentences from homonymous words which could be interpreted either as verbs or nouns. The words also varied in degree of poly­semy. The results indicated that the subjects pre- fered verbproductions when the words were grouped according to objective frequency. This was more evident when the choice of syntactic category was related to the words polysemous character. The results were explained by a presumed easier access and a larger number of entries in the subjective lexicon for verbs, caused by their relational charac ter and context dependence. The nouns on the other hand are semantically more stable and an increase in degree of polysemy restricts access to a speci­fic interpretation.digitalisering@umu.s