Making sense of word senses : evidence for a lexical ambiguity continuum

Polysemy refers to word forms that have semantically related or overlapping meanings. Studies of polysemy are few in number and contradictory. Some find differences between polysemy and homonymy (Frazier & Rayner, 1990); others find similarities (Klein & Murphy, 2001). Here, polysemous words independently rated to have low, moderate, or high semantic overlap of their distinct meanings, were studied using the methods of Klein & Murphy. Participants judged the sensicality of phrases consisting of a modifier and a polysemous word as a function of a cooperating, conflicting, or neutral context. Low and moderate-overlap words elicited slower judgments than high-overlap words, and were facilitated by a cooperating context. In contrast, high-overlap words were uniformly fast and did not differ as function of context. Thus, low- and moderate-overlap polysemous words behave similarly to homonyms, whereas high-overlap words do not. This is taken as support for a lexical ambiguity continuum delimited by homonymy and polysemy, without precise boundaries between the two