Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has found that verbs are more likely to adapttheir meaning to the semantic context provided by a noun thanthe reverse (verb mutability). One possible explanation for thiseffect is that verbs are more polysemous than nouns, allowingfor more sense-selection. We investigated this possibility bytesting polysemy as a predictor of semantic adjustment. Ourresults replicated the verb mutability effect. However, wefound no evidence that polysemy predicts meaning adjustmentin verbs. Instead, polysemy was found to predict meaningadjustment in nouns, while semantic strain was found to predictmeaning adjustment in verbs (but not nouns). This suggeststhat processes of meaning adjustment may be different fornouns vs verbs.