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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.81510 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Romero, Carolina |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts (Department of Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002185808, proquestno: AAIMR06527, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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