Polysemy

Most research on mental lexical representations (lemmas) assumes they are discrete and correspond in number to a word’s number of distinct meanings. Thus, homophones (bat), whose meanings are unrelated, have separate lemmas for each meaning (one for …

Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension‐based measures suggest that polysemes’ senses (e.g., paper as in printer paper or term paper) share lexical representations, whereas homophones’ meanings (e.g., pen as in …