Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Most words are polysemous, denoting related but distinct senses (e.g., chicken referring to an ANIMAL or to FOOD).Jager, Green, and Clelland (2016, LCN) reported facilitatory effects of polysemy on lexical processing that interacted withword frequency and type of task. We undertook a broader investigation of interactions between polysemy and severalsublexical, lexical, and semantic properties of words, to determine whether such interactions could explain inconsistenteffects of polysemy reported in the literature. Estimating degree of polysemy using dictionary sense counts, we studied theinteraction between polysemy and these other properties when predicting performance in lexical decision and semantic cat-egorization mega-studies. We observed interactions between polysemy and both lexical and semantic, but not sublexical,variables. Our results, while not replicating the exact effects reported by Jager and colleagues, highlight the importance ofdeveloping models of semantic ambiguity that take into consideration interactions with other psycholinguistic propertiesof words.