POLYSEMY AND PSYCHOLEXICOLOGY (SEMANTICS, WORD MEANING, DICTIONARY)

The relation between polysemy in the mental lexicon and in the dictionary can elucidate the nature of sense differences, sources of bias in creating definitions, and qualities that make definitions pedagocially useful.; In an experiment requiring fourth grade children and adults to match sentence exemplars to sense definitions for target words in those sentences, children were 50% correct at choosing the matching definition, while adults were 83% correct. Definitions for senses of high frequency words were easier to match to uses than those of low frequency words.; A sorting experiment required subjects to sort citations from large samples of usage for 24 nouns (varied in both frequency and polysemy), according to similarity of meaning of the key word in the citation. Subjects received 20, 100, or 200 citations. After sorting, subjects wrote definitions for their groupings. For high frequency words, subjects sorted the same citations again, guided by dictionary definitions.; Number of citations alone did not bias subjects to create more categories, and availability of dictionary definitions increased number of categories only for high polysemy words. When sorting a second time, subjects remained more consistent in their groupings for words of high polysemy. In the second sorting, interpersonal agreement about proportional distribution of citations to dictionary senses was strong for major senses.; Further studies required new subjects to write sentences using nonsense words which they saw paired with dictionary and subject definitions from the sorting study. Ratings of quality and typicality of word use were taken on the original target word in these sentences, and on the target in sentences from citation samples.; Quality of a definition grew as more citations were available for the sense it defined. Construction of a good definition for a high frequency word required relatively more citations than for a low frequency word. Citation sentences reflected differences in typicality of usage, while sentences written from definitions did not. Dictionary definitions had more synonyms than subject definitions. Number of synonyms did not correlate with quality. Concreteness of the word was correlated with quality only for subject definitions.; Thus, most words apparently have few major senses, and high frequency is associated with less informative minor uses which may account for much polysemy in dictionaries. Dictionaries do not facilitate disambiguation or construction of meaningful sentences.